Designed for kids aged 10 and up, the Mechenoid 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. And you might think from all the positive reviews that the
Mechoid is great, but let me tell you something. The Mechonoid is a terrible
disappointment. It's an offensively bad box of empty promises. And all those
positive reviews are only looking at the Mechenoid at a superficial level. It's
going to be pretty interesting for me to be the sole voice of disscent 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 game 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 Mechenoid is a robotics building
platform in name only because in reality
everything that makes a 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 misshapen, 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 Mechenoid G15 KS, we see the
1,188 pieces, of which 961 are actually just nuts and bolts,
leaving 245 plastic pieces that actually comprise the robot itself. Now,
traditional mechano mechano macano potato
potato pieces are actually made out of metal, but the mechonoid 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 Macano pieces are modular and simple, allowing the builder
to be creative with them. But pretty much everything in the
GK15S's box was specifically designed to
build one robot. Technically, you can
build anything you like, but the pieces poor design makes this enormously
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 triedand-true metal pieces that Macano is so well known for, they still
decided to keep the traditional nut andbolt 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 underos 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 Mechenoid runs through a
startup diagnostic routine, asks 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. Control section of the command
card or say list commands to hear all
commands. If you are still having trouble, please go to www. The voice
recognition seems to work well enough, but 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
mechonoids 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, LIM, or learned intelligent movement, allows you to
physically move the robot's 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 LIM library and recall it later. No
disassemble. However, it's not nearly as precise as
the commercials would imply. Mechanoid is so easy to program. Nice robots run.
What a fail. It can't play the piano. Moving on to
Ragd Doll Avatar. You can use your smartphone to directly remote control
the movements of the mechonoid. 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 Mechenoid will attempt to mimic. This one really does not work very well.
Sometimes the arms would flop around even while my own arms remained
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 mechonoid 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
10 tedious hours of bolting stuff together, but that sounds pretty boring,
too. Now, some of you may be thinking, "Hey, my kids enjoyed the Mechonoid, and
this guy isn't 10 years old, so why should his opinions matter?" Well, guess
what? I was a kid once, and I remember 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, Pokémon, 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 Mechenoid
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 slapped the
McConnell 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 that
McConnell was acquired in 2013 by a
company called SpinMaster. 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 Macano lineup. Okay. Okay. Spin Master,
I know you're watching, and I've got something to say to you. Macano has
existed for over a hundred years because they made good quality, longlasting,
interesting products. Please try to exercise some responsibility and
restraint so that you don't completely drive them into the ground with flashin
the pan products like the Mechenoid. And hey, I've got a toy idea for you. How
about a full metal McConnell 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 Traers. That's like the big robot
guy. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we don't want them at all, actually. You don't
want them at all? No, not at all. I have one here that I'm not really having any
luck selling. This one I actually sold when it was returned. So, try and get my
money back if I'm lucky on that. Right. Okay. Thanks a lot. Oh, you're welcome.
Yeah. Bye-bye. They won't even take it at toy traders.
If the Mechonoid 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 Mechenoid completely fails to
deliver enough fun or educational value to justify its $400 price tag. Okay,
everyone. That's all that's all I have to say. Uh 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 mechano 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.