mBot S.T.E.M. Educational Robot - Great intro to robotics?

[nicklmg]

Product: http://www.makeblock.cc 

 

 

NCIX: http://bit.ly/1D4qkwZ

Amazon: http://geni.us/xag

 

I was intrigued when I first saw the affordable mBot educational robot. But does this product deliver what a "kid's first robot" needs to actually teach them something?

 

[escape093]

First frame of the video:

 

[getrekt]

I'd rather build my own chassis and use my own Intel edison or arduino with the original ide for arduino

[SPFINATOR1993]

You really should have Taran host more videos.  I really enjoyed this one.

[Guest]

You don't get it. It's not for learning robotics.

It's for learning developing emotional attachments to machines. All the faults are intentionally there to make it cute in its incompetence.

[Freeman]

Taran did amazing job with this review, no cringe-worthy jokes, on point review, ton of factual information. I clicked the video to find out about mBot, knowing nothing about it and got just that, from the basic information about the brand and the product to fairly in-depth stuff, thanks!

[T.Q.]

Got A chance to play with the lego mindstorm set last week and it is bit pricey bit it is a lot of fun and the EV3 programming is easy to figure out and it works.

[Mecael]

Really enjoyed this video! Would really like to see a video (or a series...) on the LEGO Mindstorms EV3

[Proton_density]

Interesting topic, wouldn't mind more robotics on the channel or even superfun. Terran seems much more comfortable in front of the camera as well, well done!

[AxelRantila]

Taran did a great job. Hoping he gets a chance to do more videos on the main LTT channel

[mikeeginger]

Taran and Old intro Hype 

[Techdude154]

I have experience with both vex and lego robotics, so here's my 2 cents

 

I find the vex robot hardware to be well built and highly customizable. My school uses them primarily in our robotics competitions. However, the software is extremely buggy, both in the text based editor and the visual editor. The text editor crashes on me every once in a while and the visual editor leaves ghost images everywhere. There is no documentation on the code, that leaves you up to the mercy of google and various forum posts which may be from outdated versions. Our team is very likely to switch to Perdue's version of the Vex OS so we can use eclipse over RobotC

 

I find the lego robotics easier to work with then Vex because you don't have to screw with anything. However, I find that the lego robotics seem to have issues with being able to drive in a straight line. I can't speak much for lego's software as we pretty much flashed LeJOS out of the box to allow us to program java on these bots. LeJOS was documented very nicely and I had no trouble figuring out how to get a robot to follow a path and use a gyroscope to assist with turns. Without the gyroscope, the robot would not turn fully and would veer off while driving straight.

[nickl]

I'd rather build my own chassis and use my own Intel edison or arduino with the original ide for arduino

I probably would too, but for something for a child to use just as an introduction to computer programming or robotics, it may be a good starting point, if it's bugs were worked out...

[wolfgang]

I like that it shows the code when you are programing it but other than that I really like the lego mindstorms better.

[getrekt]

I probably would too, but for something for a child to use just as an introduction to computer programming or robotics, it may be a good starting point, if it's bugs were worked out...

Learning everything separately and then using it together is a better approach and will make students understand better

[The Gaige]

 

 

This is just the beginning!!!

[Makarov_9mm]

Taran did a great job! Looking forward to his next hosted video.

[nickl]

I have experience with the Lego Mindstorms product. I liked it and I quickly outgrew it (probably as a result of my short attention span and lack of creative ideas to do with it), but I can see that it can have great potential for learning and growing.

 

From Taran's (amazing) review, I can see that the mBot isn't the best developed, and by far has much less potential for customization. As well as having significant bugs that could pose problems for children (the target audience for the device), it isn't really that creative, and has little potential for expansion without purchase of additional accessories.

 

With Lego Mindstorms, I got it as a present, and I must say that Lego has made a very well made product. Mindstorms's programming system was well made, and worked well. Programming the Mindstorms "brick" was also relatively easy, and allows the user to start by making their simple car robot design that is included in the book, drive forward and backwards, and to turn, all the way to making insane Rubiks Cube Solving Robots that can solve a cube by itself! The 2 main differences between Mindstorms and the mBot are that the Mindstorms product costs significantly more, while it is (in my opinion) much more creative. Lego did a good job integrating the Mindstorms system with the main Lego pieces, which allows users to better customize ans personalize their creations, not be tied down to the cookie-cutter idea of mBot. This integration between Mindstorms and the main Lego pieces allows someone to use any Lego piece and add it to their robot, in contrast to the mBot idea, in which you have to buy any new part that you want to add.

 

I have put my Mindstorms set on a shelf by the foot of my bed, built into a Rubiks Cube Solver, mostly because I have lost interest in it, probably due to being older than the intended audience, and not having creative ideas of what to make with it, but I can see that if used by someone who had more imagination, and was younger, could have maybe even years of entertainment from it. This is one reason that I think that the Mindstorms set would be a good choice for schools, as they would have new kids going through that would all be interested in the product, and not having it going out of popularity. My elementary school had a few Mindstorms sets which they even used to enter the FLL competition stuff.

 

But I have to say that I probably am being a bit hard on mBot, as a basic, beginners robotics set, it might be good enough for what it is. Apart from some of the bugs that it has, I can see that it might have potential, for being (or so they promise) $50, and for being less DIY than the Lego set.

 

Overall I would buy the Lego product, despite the higher price, for the greater possibilities that it has over the mBot.

 

NOTE: I have only used the Mindstorms NXT 2.0 set, and not with the current EV3 set.

[Anonyte]

Nice video, and this is quite promising actually, the software needs a lot of polish and the kit needs to be a little cheaper but I can get behind cheap entry level robotics for children! Heck not long ago I was planing to hack into some cheap lego mobile some power function motors, sensors and an arduino and make it a birthday present for my little brother, too bad I still don't have time for that now...

 

Oh and there are a lot of real time os implementations for arduino (github.com/greiman/FreeRTOS-Arduino github.com/greiman/ChibiOS-Arduino) if you really need to work with parallel tasks (we had a hole course on rtos and scheduling on bare metal but I think it's not something too complicated if you don't give a crap about theory)

and if a hole os, even embedded, just for some blinky or a tad more complicated program seems overkill and you don't really need semaphores mutexes and fancy synchronization tools, you can actually quite easily go from parallel to sequential code, it's just a matter of automata cross product.

Suppose you have two automatas (or parrallel code) :

 

                x0/y0

+----+  --------------> +-----+

| A0 |                       |  A1 |

+----+ <--------------  +-----+

                x1/y1

 

 

                x2/y2

+----+  --------------> +-----+

| B0 |                       |  B1 |

+----+ <--------------  +-----+

                x3/y3

 

the cross product is simply :

 

 

               x2/y2

A0B0 ------------------>  A0B1

  |                                  ^

  |                                   |

  |                                   | x1/y1

  v                                  |

A1B0 ------------------> A1B1

 

I leave the missing transitions and their input/output as an exercise

 

this can easily be translated into some switch based state machine, but I digress, I'm looking forward to future videos!

[wdornbach]

Taran, man I have to say...

This review was close to perfect.

All research was done in-depth and everything was explained amazingly.

 

Great job.  I bet most people will agree with me when I say that this video was worlds better than many of Linus and Luke's.

[MastuhWaffles]

He's a good host, that robot sucks. It just wants to stare into your soul.