For the holiday we thought a Mecanoid robot would be fun. I stalked the black Friday sales and found the big one for sale at a good price. My little one had thought they looked fun when he noticed one at the store, but by the time Christmas came around he had quit mentioning the robot and was asking for other things. This wasn’t a great sign, but the Mecanoid was already in a box.
Mecanoid took two days to build! The robot requires nuts and bolts put in all the right places and lots of instructions. I had some problems with the instructions which were completely pictures, and in a couple places the pictures weren’t correct…. adding to the difficulty. We finally did get the robot built after tag teaming the built between my two oldest boys, my husband, and I over the two days. – I should mention that two days into the Mecanoid working one of the shoulder bolts came loose and had to be redone. The arm was flying everywhere as Mecanoid swung it around telling us a joke.
After turning it on and going through some set up, we were able to control the robot. He can follow voice commands for movement, tell us a joke, and many more things. My youngest though was afraid of him at first. After adjusting my little one did laugh at the jokes, and watch from a distance. After a week he finally got to the point he was willing to work with Mecanoid enough to try to change his name.
My youngest names everything after something about themselves – that’s how we have a frog named Leaf 2 (Leaf was found on a leaf) and a Toad named Ignis.. (A fire bellied toad and Ignis means fiire in Latin)…. So a robot became Robby. While hubby and my little one were working on setting the name of Robby the Robot though a mistake was made and Robby became fjaldfjdslfjadsf or something like that, that can’t be repeated.
The robot requires the user to say it’s name to command it to do anything, so we are stuck now until we reset the robot. Next step to reset Robby back to the beginning and correct his name!
Some of the Commands a Meccanoid recognizes:
- Introduce Yourself
- List Commands
- High Five
- Tell Me a Joke
- Walk with Me
- Motion Control
- Forward
- Backward
- Left Turn
- Right Turn
- Turn Around
- Kung Fu
- Exercise
- Dance
- Shake Hands
- What Time is It
- LIM (This is Learned Intelligent Movement)
- Help
- Settings
- Go to Sleep
Of course all of these require that you be able to say it’s name first. The Meccano robot will wait for you to say it’s name, and then when it hears it – the eyes change colors signifying time to start issuing commands.
It also appears to use the Arduino processor – meaning it’s open source and if you really want to get into the insides you can modify the programming. I have downloaded the libraries, but haven’t played with them yet.
Time to try to reset the name on ours!
(This is the shorter robot G15 – the G15KS is the taller robot that we have.)
I am a SAHM/WAHM of three boys ranging in age from 13 to 29. We are working on saving enough for college at the same time as dealing with school and our older independent kids. I author a few blogs, including http://teched4kids.com. I have in the past taught computer information technology classes for the local university and taught workshops for kid's in technology education besides being the Kentucky State FIRST LEGO League Championship Coordinator from 2005 to 2008. I now work as a computer consultant, run a handmade home business, and am available for workshops. Life here is always an adventure!
