Tech*knowledg*ry: Buyincoins, good enough!

So far after a quick test of a couple Arduino's I got from buyincoins.com (BiC) I'm going to have to say I'm pretty happy with the items. I wish I had a nice little light tent for shooting macro pics of all these items (another thing to add to the long list of things I need to build). For the most part you can read most of the text on the chips, but I was having a tough time balancing glare with enough light to see everything well.

Everything seemed to be in good shape and the only thing with a little damage was the breadboard power supply which suffered a few slightly bent legs during the international shipment, but that seems like a small issue for how inexpensive most of this stuff was and it was pretty easy to bend them back into the proper position.

First up I picked up a couple of Arduino UNO's. I had a genuine UNO R2 (release 2) I purchased about a year ago to compare to the one I got from BiC. There are a few minor differences, but I'm not sure if that's because the BiC UNO is just an R1 instead of an R2.

LEFT: BiC Arduino UNO RIGHT: Original UNO r2
High Quality Arduino Uno ATmega328P-PU Module ATMEGA8U2 AVR

The bottom of the boards gives a little more info on the boards. Since the BiC board doesn't have an R2 or R3 after the UNO I'm assuming it's probably an R1

LEFT: BiC Arduino UNO RIGHT: Original UNO r2
High Quality Arduino Uno ATmega328P-PU Module ATMEGA8U2 AVR

Next up is a motor shield, I picked up one from Adafruit last summer that was unassembled so all the poor soldering on the original Adafruit board is my own poor soldering skills. I've gotten much better with soldering since last summer when I put the board together, but honestly not that much better.

LEFT: BiC Motor Shield RIGHT: Original Adafruit Motor Shield
Motor Drive Shield Expansion Board L293D

LEFT: BiC Motor Shield RIGHT: Original Adafruit Motor Shield
I assembled the original board so the bad soldering... me.
Motor Drive Shield Expansion Board L293D

I also picked up a couple of Arduino Nano V3's I didn't own any original Arduino Nano boards so I didn't have anything to compare it next to and the same goes for the rest of the stuff I got from BiC so from here on out it's a picture party... wooooooooo The captions below each picture is the listing name in BiC of each item. I was a little confused by the Arduino UNO MEGA 2560, but I was just hoping it was some kind of typo or copy pasta.

Arduino Nano V3.0 AVR ATmega328 P-20AU (bottom)

Arduino Nano V3.0 AVR ATmega328 P-20AU (top)

cheap 3 axis accelerometors I had to pick up a few. I have no projects in the near future I would need these for, but I'll figure out something awesome to do with them eventually.

MMA7361 Angle Sensor Inclination Accelerometer

New Character LCD Module Display LCM 1602 16X2 HD44780 Blue Blacklight

Perfect High Quality MB102 Breadboard Power Supply Module 3.3V 5V Arduino Board (top)

Perfect High Quality MB102 Breadboard Power Supply Module 3.3V 5V Arduino Board (bottom)

I'm hoping to use the Arduino MEGA 2560 to control the RAMPS 1.4 board and Pololu stepper controllers to control the reprap prusa I'm currently building.