So Santa got the kids one mBot each for Christmas! One pink and one blue. The kids were each able to put together the robots themselves without help from Dad. Pretty impressive! My son is 8 and my daughter is 11. As I already own the Ultimate Robot Kit, I had no problem connecting the robots to the PC and installing mBlock 3.2.
After updating the firmware, we were able to connect to the bots from the android app. Side note: as we have Amazon fire tablets, I had to side-load the app’s APK on to the devices. Makeblock, please get your apps onto the Amazon AppStore!
Now the kids are playing soccer with their bots:
I’m very pleased with how smoothly things are going so far. It helps that I have been playing with the other kit for some time now. On thing I am having problems with: The app has an “Unmanned” mode. I expected it would work with the ultrasonic sensor but it just crashes into things. I’m not sure if it is the app or the sensor that is the problem. I’ll have to test the sensor out. The line following mode works great as well as all the other modes on the app.
Next steps are to begin programming the mBot. We also have the LED matrix to play with. We are all looking forward to learning more!