Robotix Reviews

I got the bowling style and its soooooooo cute! it doesn't interfear that much and is awesome!

I love it, now I can take my Idog to work with me. It fits the Idog, mp3 player, user manuals, earphones, and extra batteries. I highly recommend it if you plan to use your Idog anywhere other that home.

this toy is very cool. its ears and head moves to your music.if you don't have a mp3 or music player its ok because i-dog has a microphone and can hear the music if u put the i-dog next to a speaker. the i-dog has to be fed (music). you do that by conecting a cord close to the right back foot (under a latch) and the other end of the cord to your music divise. i like and enjoy this item. hope my review helps!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This thing is fantastic. It has 75 possible experiments that can be done without help if you stay within the age group recommended. Kids can use the included wires to make bells, buzzers, lights, sirens, and more. It's all about following the diagram and connecting the included wires to the terminals. That's all there is too it. It travels well too for hours and I mean hours of fun in the car. The parts are all connected to the board so there's nothing to fall out. You can buy extra wire anywhere. This "toy" is a great value.

This is the most boring, stupidest, piece of crud i have ever seen. If you are smart, never, ever, even think about buying this toy. Only an idiot would go ahead and buy it after i told you this. It is a huge dissapointment, I used two weeks of allowence to buy this, and when I took him out of the box and put batteries in, I almost cried.

I'm plaing about that,but don't get this,the first 4 days it's cool with the walking,dancing,burping,and whisling, but thats basicly it.It's stupied.I rather get the raptor one.

this toy is OK it only walks it pick stuff up but i also would like to know why dose it say a fusion of personalty and technolgy i mean it only walks i recomend this toy a bit just a bit but its ok if you do have enogh money get mini roborapter

I agree with the first reviewer. I purchased this kit for my 10 year old son, who is above average intelligence and has a voracious appetite for scientific knowledge and experiments. He is fascinated by the kit, but the instruction book is so poorly written that he cannot even begin to make sense of it. I am taking the other reviewers advice and purchasing some other basic electronics books in hopes of salvaging the [money] spent on the kit.

I rate myself as a complete beginner when it comes to
basic electronics. As with anything the best way to
learn is to practically do it, which can be difficult
and extremely expensive when it comes to electronics.
This project kit has to be probably the best starting
point for anyone who wants to get into electronics
because it focuses on the practical side which is a great
experience.

Looking at the product packaging the box looks high quality
until you look inside. It would have been extremely nice to
have batteries included to get working on the projects as
soon as possible. The electronic device itself is plastic
and can shatter to bits if you are not carefull.
The manual itself is wide making it extremely difficult to
handle. Probably the most irritating thing about the manual is
the layout. It starts off in English only to suddenly move off
to other languages. Each project section is actually split into
different languages increasing the size of the manual.

Apart from that I found the instructions were pretty much
easy to follow and straight to the point. The most noticable
thing about the manual I found was that it will get you
on your feet and going but thats about it. A paragraph or two
is included for each section summarising what the circuit does
but chances are you will want more information on what is going.
A good electronics book should help although you wont need
it if you are already familiar with whats going on. A simple
look at the a good website should be enough to increase your
understanding.

The most surprising thing I found about this product
was that a lot of the interesting components happen to be
on the main device itself. You only connect the
necessary components to the appropriate connectors - placing
the ICs, capacitors, transistors and wires on the rather
small breadboard. A good pair of thin pliars is probably
recommended as it can get seriously messy especially with the
more complex and demanding projects.

All in all a superb product, looks cheap for the price but
dont let that fool you. Dont expect to make a full fledged
electronic game or a full fledged radio out of this but do
expect to learn enough to be able to get a grasp of advanced
electronics. With 300 projects on the list, chances are
you'll probably think of something cool yourself after you've
completed all 300.

Finally I have to say this - the kit is pretty advanced for a
bunch of 10 year olds. If you do decide to give it to the
younger enthusiast, be sure to help out. It takes patience and
practice otherwise the components could break or become damaged.
Another important note is that a lot of the components will
damage if static gets hold of them.

I've always been interested in learning at least the basics about electronics and finally decided to do something about it. I bought a couple of 'intro to electronics', 'electonrics basics' type books and I bought this toy. While rated for 10 years and up, they'd be pretty bright 10 year olds. The kit comes with capacitors, resistors, diodes, wires, transistors and even IC's. The other reviewer is correct. Resistors are all color coded -- and very small --- and very many in this kit. I finally spent about 4 hours labelling over 50 tiny plastic bags so I could easily find the appropriate parts to do the projects.
The manual explains how to identify all the parts, and for the projects uses a step by step approach to instruct one on how to put the project together. For example, "Insert 100 ohm resistor in B12 and J12 on the breadboard". In this respect, yes, a 10 year old could easily follow these instructions. The diagrams show the breadboard layout as well as showing you the "real" schematics. That coupled with my reading through my "electronics for dummies" books -- it's actually all starting to make sense as to why components are laid out they way they are. Without the other books, I would not have figured that out just from this kit -- but, if you just want to make things flash and make sounds etc and follow the instructions, that that won't matter. The manual does attempt to explain why something works -- but I was lacking the bare basics, so it didn't make much sense.

All in all, I would highly recommend this kit to anyone who really has an interest in learning about basic electronics and wants to put things together.

It would be a great kit for family projects. However, there are a ton of very small parts and good eyesight or a magnifying glass and a flashlight would be recommended for those of us with less then perfect eyesight.

Well worth the cost, working out to much much less then $[money]/hour of enjoyment to work through the 300 projects.

I pre-ordered a got the new NXT box last week. I built the alpha-rex. It was fun. Here are my impressions so far...

1. The motors, sensors are well designed and works great.
2. I found a single defective piece in my set which is very uncharacteristic for lego. However, it was still usable.
3. The bluetooth gave me some problems on the second day of usuage. My laptop (Dell Precision M70) and the NXT brick couldnt connect. I had to use USB to download. I dont think its serious issue as it had worked fine previously.
4. The labview software was intutive and straight forward. However, I believe that a 10 year old will need some lessons to get used to it.
5. The display interface on the brick is very intutive. It could have been better with backlight...but then again I think that would eat up the battery faster..
6. The packaging is very disappointing. I plan to buy separate plastic boxes for storage.

Overall, I am very excited and happy with the product. I cant wait for the bluetooth resources that lego will post on their website, which will let me do some cool stuff...i hope :)

My NXT set just arrived by FedEx this afternoon. I'm a parent of two (6 and 3-year old) so this is mainly for me for now. I was an early adopter of the first generation of Mindstorms, so naturally I pre-ordered the NXT. I've played with it for two hours, so these are my initial impressions:

- the new motors are Wonderful -- they work as motors or servos (you tell them which angle to go to). They look futuristic and robot-y

- it comes with an ultrasound distance sensor -- whoa that's neat!

- All of the sensors are "slick-looking", and seem to work very well.

- the brick display is quite nice, but the interface is a bit niggly. Lots of nested menus. My 3 year-old managed to delete the built in demo program by button twiddling. It was easy to restore, though.

- the box itself (the "out of box experience") is disappointing. You have to punch out some quarter-circles to allow it to hinge, but they're poorly serrated, so the tears come out ugly. The inner boxes are hard to open so you end up messing those up. In short, the previous mindstorms box was a great long-term storage solution. This one is going in the trash. As a first impression, it's pretty poor.

- back to the good: there's a "quick-start guide" that gets you building a simple robot that is run by a built in demo program. It's perfect: not difficult, but not trivial -- it makes noises and moves around. The kids were enchanted.

- the "powered by LabView" programming environment seems halfway between the nerd-y LabView system that you could buy from Dacta and the totally bozo thing bundled with the old Mindstorms. It doesn't have that "rocket scientist" feel of the old LabView environment, which is both good (it's more self-guided) and bad (I don't see how to zoom out so that I can see complex programs all at once, for example.

All in all, this thing is very impressive, has lots of staying power, and since it supports MacOS X, I'll actually use it, and will most likely pull out my old MindStorms and combine parts. Thanks, Lego -- keep up the great work!

Firmware update worked fine for me. You may need to reset your NXT brick (paperclip beside the usb port) and redownload.

My three year old daughter and I built and programmed the tribot in about three hours. We're thrilled with it.

After one day with this toy I thought it ruled. Then something happened that had convinced me other wise. On the second day It's arm broke. The arm would not open or close. IT was cool for one DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got this gift for Christmas this year and I was SUPER excited! The first ten minutes were great. After that there was nothing else to do with it. My cousins thought it was cool when they came over for the Christmas party, but then after ten minutes with them they got bored. Then the next day I tried using one of the arms and it wouldnt move properly or open! I did NOT drop it, DID NOT shake it! And I did NOT move the arm manually. So now we have no use for it and my little brother uses it for completely stupid things. Maybe I might be lucky and get something cooler like a Roboraptor, or even a Robosapien V2!

It is awsome when you buy it, but after a day you no all the bottons and it is boring. If you think you have lot of money you can buy 2 robots and it is 2x as fun.It also turns slow, but you can have fun with it at first.It was the best toy in the universe for day 1.You probaly should try the other robots. I recomend you get a different 1. If it was cheaper it might be worth it.

I last personnaly used legos 25 years ago. LEGO Mindstorms made me do a come back. It has a great educationnal value when used with kids. It has enormous value if you like to experiment with robots. It takes few hours of my time regularly.
I even proposed it to our kids' school as one of the extra curiculum actvities. For two years in a row I taught robotics to kids of the age 8 to 11. You just had to see their eyes when the robots did what they were programed to do.

GREAT LEGO SET

This kit is great if you want to make a robotics project, as well as supplementing an existing project. Not just a toy.

MindStorms and the internet communities that have evolved around it will be instrumental in changing the Robotics landscape for ever