Vilros Raspberry Pi 4 Complete Starter Kit- Includes Raspberry Pi 4 Board, Fan Cooled Case, 64GB Preloaded Micro SD Card and More (4GB, Clear Transparent Case)

The things that I like about this product are the case with integral fan, a preprogrammed 64 GB microSD card with operating system (OS), and 4 device self-adhering heatsinks. This particular Rasberry Pi 4 has 2 GB of memory which is more than adequate for my application. I began by aligning the printed circuit board with the case. It will only drop in one way. Next, I applied the self-adhering heatsinks to the integrated circuits noted in the instructions. Before closing the case I connected the fan to the header as shown in the instructions. Pin 1 on the header is the red, positive fan lead, while the black, negative fan lead is connected to pin 14. The instructions should be more clear about the numbering of the two-row header. All of the pins that are in the row with Pin1 are the odd pins, while all of the pins on the side where the black lead is to be connected are even. Thus, on the even side, we count 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and we connect the black fan lead to pin 14. Next, the case is closed. Take care not to pinch the fan wires. The enclosed 64 GB microSD card comes preprogrammed, and it says so on the packaging if you read the small print on the back. Therefore, you do not have to buy an additional microSD card to image an operating system. That is a nice feature. The next step is to plug the microSD card into the card slot. It can only be inserted one way. Make sure that contacts on the socket match the contacts on the microSD card. Once that is done, the next thing to do is to plug a monitor into one of the two HDMI ports. The port to use is the one closest to the power input port if you are only using one monitor. A TV set with HDMI input can also be used. I didn't want to set up a monitor, so I used my TV. Switch the TV to a free HDMI source port. Plug the HDMI plug into the TV. You will also need to connect a mouse and keyboard to the USB ports. In my case, I own a wireless mouse and keyboard, so all I had to do was plug the wireless adapter into one of the USB 2.0 ports. The last thing to do is to plug the power connector into the power port on the Rasberry Pi. The instructions never say which way to plug the connector in. It will fit into the connector either way. Get a bright flashlight and look at the contacts inside the power cable connector and the contacts in the Rasberry Pi power connector. You will want the contacts in the cable connector to face the contacts in the Rasberry Pi connector. It is important to get this right so that the Rasberry Pi is not powered off and on inadvertently. This could corrupt the microSD card. Once everything is right, click the inline switch on the power cable to turn the Rasberry Pi on. If you peek inside the case, you will see LED lights if the power connector is plugged in the right way. You will also hear a whirring sound from the cooling fan. You should see a welcome screen. There will be some preferences to select as well as country, time zones, language and screen size preferences. Next, you will connect to WiFi or Ethernet to download updates to the Rasberry Pi. This procedure should not be interrupted. It only takes a few minutes if you have a fast Internet connection. Once the updates have completed, you will be on the home page. One thing that is not made clear in the instruction manual is why the Rasberry Pi should be shut down properly. It is to prevent corruption of anything stored in memory. There is a way to install a shutdown switch that will close the operating system nicely, but that is not included in the manual. There are two ways to close the operating system before powering down. The first is a selection on the Rasberry Pi icon on the upper left corner of the GUI screen. The pull-down menu shows a selection "logout". By selecting logout, another selection menu appears. The shutdown option should be selected. The Rasberry Pi will shut down correctly. The other option is to select the terminal icon at the top of the page. A terminal page will appear. Type the following at the prompt: "sudo shutdown -h now" and the Rasberry Pi will shut down nicely. This review is written by a newbie. I am a senior, and I had no prior knowledge of Rasberry Pi other than a little web surfing before I opened the package to set up the Rasberry Pi. I plan to use this Rasberry Pi to run an application called HamClock, and I can see that this will be easy to do. I am impressed with this kit, the ease with which it can be configured and the value received. It was up and running in about an hour. Like most anything new, it pays to do a little bit of reading before taking the plunge.

Very useful. The delivery was on time and everything was fine.

I was looking for something lightweight, practical, and easy to use to start monitoring my garden and greenhouse, and this weather station fit exactly what I needed. The setup was quick and syncing the outdoor sensor was super easy. It gives real-time updates on temperature, humidity, wind speed, rain, and even moon phases, and the colorful screen is super clear to read from a distance. I love that it has customizable alerts for weather changes too. It’s been really helpful for keeping an eye on my plants and planning my watering better without guessing. Super happy with it so far!

Nice kit, fan is too loud.

For all of its virtues the pi had some shortcomings as far as development went. You were always forced to ssh into it from a real computer if you planned on having a few chrome tabs opened while working on a project. Me personally, I like having several tabs up trying to research how to do one thing or another and could never do that on pi 1-3.The 4g model takes it in stride. No need to ssh from a pc or having to switch hdmi cables if I needed display on the pi. No more sudden freezing with cpu load at 100% because you open a text document (pi zero).It has some shortcomings, the usb-c does not support slave mode so you cant use it as a device on another computer. Somewhat frustrating since it would have been fairly easy to implement. So stuck with a pi zero if you need that, hopefully that will get updated next rev.The bootup is significantly faster from pi 3. Along with usb speeds. Im planning on getting a google coral usb stick to try some tensorflow projects along with opencv. Something that would have worked on a pi3 albeit much slower.As far as the remainder of the kit is concerned. The provided heatsinks are nice but you really only need that for the cpu and memory. The other 2 are for the usb and ethernet controller. Not something that traditionally needs a heatsink. You also need to be somewhat careful putting these heatsinks on as you can easily bridge a resistor or capacitor bank and potentially damage the board. Im saving those 2 for something else.The fan is helpful and necessary for a heavy workload. The pi4 is much faster overall when you keep its temperatures no higher than 80c which you will eventually hit with just a heatsink. The fan is loud on 5v, so I set mine to “quiet mode” which is red wire to 3.3v and black to ground. Still gets hot, low to mid 70s but no throttling. The fan wires are on the short side. The wires come out the hdmi/usb-c side and have to snake around the fan across the dsi port (above the sd card slot) and around to the gpio. There is enough length but only just.At the time of this writing there is a firmware update to further reduce temps by 3-5c but apparently this also throttles usb read/write speeds. I haven't tried it and dont intend to mess with that.The case is good quality, you can tell they spent a little money on the plastic manufacturing. The tolerances are tight and the pi fits in snuggly with the lid giving a satisfying snap. Its thick enough not to pop open if you drop it off your desk. One issue is if you use the camera mount on the case, the ribbon cable will run into the fan unless you apply an unreasonable bend to the cable which could easily damage it. It worked for me but could have easily just broken the cable.Power supply is perfect to run the pi for any workload with a decent amount of peripherals. When I get my coral usb stick, I may need a powered usb bank to accommodate it along with a webcam @500mA but perhaps not.The sd card is just dandy. And a real Samsung sd.It was kind of hard to tell what that little black box was in the picture (left of the pi in the main pic). I assumed it was the sd card usb reader which it is. Just never seen that design. Essentially its just the male usb portion with a slight opening for an sd card. Very minimal and cost saving design but adequate.I paid $100 for the 4gb kit and do not regret it. Some minor shortcomings but overall a robust improvement from pi3. The rest of the kit provides good value for the cost. You’re not getting a flimsy case and cheap power supply.