Gadgetory

designed for kids aged 10 and up the mechanoid is both a toy and a robotics kit it's being touted as a personal robot best friend they say you can build anything and that programming is easy and innovative they say your kid will learn the core values of science technology engineering and mathematics then you might think from all the positive reviews that the mechanoid is great but let me tell you something the mechanoid is a terrible disappointment it's an offensively bad box of empty promises and all those positive reviews are only looking at the mechanoid at a superficial level it's going to be pretty interesting for me to be the sole voice of dissent on this one so let's get into it shall we I by powers revolt 2 has been redesigned from the ground up to utilize its small form-factor to hold the power you need to gain with confidence check out their link in the video description to learn more let me give you my thesis statement right off the top the mechanoid is a robotics building platform in name only because in reality everything that makes the robotics kit good has been sacrificed and compromised to blindly serve a singular objective to make this thing as cute as possible so that it will sell as a result the pieces are miss shapen the instructions are a mess the assembly process is tedious the programming options are laughably simplistic and the price tag is a bloated $400 opening up the box for the meccanoid g15 KS we see the 1188 pieces of which 961 are actually just nuts and bolts leaving 245 plastic pieces that actually comprise the robot itself now traditional Meccano Meccano Meccano potato potato whatever Meccano pieces are actually made out of metal but the mechanoid pieces are plastic I'm guessing because a fully metal robot of this size would just be absurdly expensive to produce of course you could just make it smaller but then it wouldn't have the cool factor that they seem to be banking on what makes these pieces truly awful is not the fact that they're made out of plastic but the fact that they are such enormous weird and specialized shapes you see traditional Meccano pieces are modular and simple allowing the Builder to be creative with them but pretty much everything in the GK 15 s's box was specifically designed to build one robot technically you can build anything you like but the pieces poor design makes this enormous ly difficult there aren't nearly enough attachment holes to use and the few that there are are not always positioned logically there are also these random studs that poke out and completely get in the way making many configurations impossible the studs don't even serve to hold stuff together they just simply prevent pieces from sliding around while you attach them with the nuts and bolts I mean what on earth am I supposed to do with this or this or this they seriously couldn't break these up into smaller more constituent parts with mounting points at predictable intervals the only positive feature of these pieces is that many of them have square indentations designed to hold the nuts in place for when you're bolting everything together during assembly so let's talk about that shall we even though the designers decided to abandon the tried-and-true metal pieces that Meccano is so well known for they still decided to keep the traditional nut and bolt attachment system something that people already complain about perhaps this was done to maintain compatibility with the traditional metal pieces but no self-respecting builder is going to go anywhere near these plastic atrocities so frankly I don't see the point surely there must be a simpler way for kids to quickly attach these pieces together some kind of pin system that snaps in place perhaps nope instead your 10 year old will be stuck assembling this oversized monstrosity for hours and hours of just screwing together pieces using these tiny nuts and bolts all 961 of them the entire process took me eight tedious hours and unlike building something out of Lego I did not find it interesting or enjoyable and that's partly due to the dreadful instructions which are so bad for so many reasons often they'll combine several steps into one which greatly increases the chance of doing something wrong plus there's almost never an image that shows what a fully assembled step is supposed to look like and you can't just look at the next step for that because the model on the page undergoes constant changes in orientation also sometimes you have to use a slightly different nut or bolt but because they're all the same color it's not immediately obvious I hope you didn't accidentally mix any of these bolts together even while paying very close attention I still made several mistakes which can take quite a while to realize and even longer to fix because it usually involves disassembling some correct parts so that you can get to the incorrect parts but ladies and gentlemen the disappointment doesn't stop there with everything finally attached and plugged in correctly the mechanoid runs through a start-up diagnostic routine for your name and enters the main menu you have to use voice commands to navigate the menus which kind of feels like I'm on the phone with my cell phone provider or say list commands to hear all commands if you are still having trouble please go - w-w-w-what you do have to repeat yourself sometimes and you also have to wait for the mechanoid to stop talking before it will listen for your commands which can take a while here's a list of all the mechanoids menu commands it can tell jokes and tell you what time it is which is exactly as exciting as it sounds walk with me seems to work fine but doesn't look like it can move backwards in this mode shake hands and high-five work pretty much just as you would expect them to the motion control commands also seem to work fine it all works it's just not really that interesting forward now the website lists three innovative ways to program so let's take a look at that the first one Li M or learned intelligent movement allows you to physically move the robots arms around which can be recorded and replayed along with your voice I have to admit I did have some fun with this one no no disassemble you can then save this to the Li M library and recall it later however it's not nearly as precise as the commercials would imply necking away two souls in the program right robot run it can't play the piano moving on to ragdoll avatar you can use your smartphone to directly remote control the movements of the mechanoid this also works pretty well you can even change the colors of the LEDs if you really want to and finally motion capture mode uses your smartphone's camera to record your movements which the mechanoid will attempt to mimic this one really does not work very well sometimes the arms would flop around even while my own arms remain completely stationary and that's it it's just three different ways you can tell the robot to make noise and wave its arms around which can be recorded and replayed I don't consider that to be programming for the real programming you can download this arduino library but this only became available quite recently so it was obviously never really a priority well I guess if you understand C++ you can program the mechanoid any way you like but honestly why would you want to and tell me what is the point of having arms if the hands don't do anything it would be cool if the hands actually worked and the fingers could grasp objects and pick stuff up but they can't which is boring I guess you could take it apart and build the dinosaur you know if you want another ten tedious hours of bolting stuff together but that sounds pretty boring too now some of you may be thinking hey my kids enjoyed the mechanoid and this guy isn't ten years old so why should his opinions matter well guess what I was a kid once and I remembered that the best toys were the ones with great replay value the toys I kept playing with and coming back to time and time again for me this was Lego Nintendo Pokemon game maker 5 I still have all that stuff and the other toys they probably went to the trash or the thrift store once assembled there's so little you can do with the mechanoid that I don't see how it's going to maintain the interest of most children beyond I don't know a week or two and after that I predict the novelty will wear off and it'll be pushed into a corner and never played with again the mechanoid is so terrible in fact that it feels to me like some other company designed it and then just slap the Meccano label on top which is kind of funny because I wrote those words and then later discovered that it's actually true yes my friends it turns out the Meccano was acquired in 2013 by a company called Spin Master oh it all makes sense now Spin Master are the ones to blame for this mess look at this article apparently their idea of a Renaissance is to add a bunch of cheap cutesy colorful crap into the Meccano lineup ok ok Spin Master I know you're watching and I've got something to say to you Meccano has existed for over a years because they made good quality long-lasting interesting products please try to exercise some responsibility and restraint so that you don't completely drive them into the ground with flash-in-the-pan products like the mechanoid and hey I've got a toy idea for you how about a full metal Makana robot with wheels gears axles beams LEDs several motors and a full array of sensors give it a fully programmable brain with remote control and give us instructions for building cool stuff and then price it competitively now that's a great robotics kit that would support STEM education vex robotics figured this out and so can you and now let's see if I can sell this thing maybe I can trade it in for a better toy at toy traders yeah that's right you don't want them at all right ok thanks a lot yeah buh-bye they won't even take it at toy traders if the mechanoid was just an overly expensive toy I wouldn't care but they're selling it as if it's a stem educational robotics kit and it's just not the mechanoid completely fails to deliver enough fun or educational value to justify its $400 price tag ok everyone that's all that's all I have to say I'm just I'm still I'm so shocked at all the positive reviews for this thing do you think I'm missing something am I wrong leave a comment below with your thoughts and did you play with traditional Meccano growing up what did you think of it leave a comment about that too and go ahead and slap a like on this video or a dislike get subscribed or don't whatever check out our forums buy a t-shirt I promise none of them cost $400 and check out my review of the vex IQ super kit if you want to see what a proper robotics kit looks like and hopefully I'll have a review of the Mindstorms ev3 coming soon as well see you next time you