Meccano MeccaNoid G15 KS Robot

Product Description

For over 100 years Meccano has allowed you to explore real engineering, using real tools. Now, experience Meccano’s new innovation in robotics with its latest offering, the Meccanoid G15KS Personal Robot. When you build a Meccanoid G15KS Personal Robot, you’re building a friend. It’s easy, using the real tools included. When you’re all done building Meccanoid’s frame and have plugged in the batteries, it will use its Meccabrain to guide you through connecting its motors. You can even rebuild Meccanoid as a dinosaur, or anything else you can dream up. With your imagination and 1,223 parts to play with, the possibilities are endless! Standing almost 4 feet tall the Meccanoid G15KS uses advanced technology and 10 motors to deliver even more realistic movement to its arms head and feet. Watch as Meccaoids large LED eyes light up with over 500 color options! Programming your Meccanoid G15KS is easy and intuitive, no special skills required! Thanks to its Learned Intelligent Movement (LIM) technology, you can simply move its arms and head or speak to it and Meccanoid records what you’re doing and repeats it back to you! Meccanoid’s powerful, built-in Meccabrain is the key to its programming. It contains 64 megabits of flash memory allowing it to learn movements and record sounds that play back. For interactive fun use the Motion Capture feature on the Meccanoid app free for your smart device. Place your smart device into Meccanoid, activate the Motion Capture and marvel as Meccanoid mirrors your every action! Or swipe the on-screen Ragdoll avatar to make Meccanoid twist, turn or move any way you want! Meccanoid G15KS is your wisecracking best friend with an intelligence shaped by you! Its amazing voice recognition capabilities and over a thousand pre-programmed phrases, comments and witty comebacks will have you laughing as it tells jokes and plays games! With a friend like the Meccanoid G15KS Personal Robot, there’s no limit to the fun you can have!

Features

• The 2016 award winning Innovative Toy Of The Year Meccano Meccanoid G15KS Personal Robot comes with over one thousand phrases and voice recognition to make your personal robot more like your best friend!
• Download the free app from Google Play or AppStore. Works with iOS and Android.
• Build, program and play with this fully-operational, 4-foot-tall robot, with life-like articulated limbs powered by 10 motors for realistic movement.
• The Meccano Meccanoid G15KS Personal Robot is for ages 10 and up. 1800mAh NiMH Battery and charger included.
• Includes: 1223 Parts, 1 AC/DC Wall Mount Charger, 1 Rechargeable 1800mAh NiMH Battery, 1 MeccabrainTM, 1 LED Module, 2 Hand Tools, 8 Servos, 2 Rear Wheel asembly, 2 Motor Gearbox Assembly

Top Reviews

Amazing, unique toy, but the novelty quickly wears off
by Matt (3 out of 5 stars)
September 27, 2015

After taking bout 8 hrs to put this bad-boy together, I have to admit I was ecstatic when he fist turned on (I added a bunch of pics to show you the approximate time intervals for the building project). When I had him all put together, he asked me to help set him up and talked, gestured, and told me how to give him commands. However, less than a few hours of use, and I have to say that I'm slightly disappointed. Yea, he does some cool things. He dances, he tells jokes, and he knows kung fu, but it's all just about 10 minutes worth of novelty amusement.

I really thought that the customized movements and remote control via app would add to the pre-programmed novelty gestures. But those were very disappointing. The remote app is very difficult to control, and I can see it's for good reason: The app just shows you a picture of Meccanoid, with pivot points where the servos are. You drag them around to perform the movements you want. There are also forward/backward arrows that allow you to control his position in the room.

It's hard to get an arm to move in 3D from a 2D surface on a phone/tablet. Think about it: raise your arm up straight in front of your body, and back behind your body both look the same from a 2D perspective (the screen just sees 'up', it can't tell if you intend forward or backward). Granted, you can pan around via the screen and look at him from a side angle, which allows you to move his arm 'up/forward' or 'up/backward', but then if you do that, you loose access to the OTHER arm which is now out of sight. Furthermore, the lag between the app and the phone is significant. And finally, trying to get him to mimic moves is impossible - for some reason he can never see me through my phone. It's very possible i'm not doing it right, but there are little/no instructions to guide me in this mode. All I do is open the app, put him in mimic mode, then I can see me on the screen. There are notifications that say 'too close' or 'too many people' or 'too dark', but that's it. When I remedy all those issues, he just seems to sit there staring at me, but not copying me. There is no feedback from him, so I don't know what he needs me to do (if anything) to get him to start copying me. These inconveniences make me give up on trying to control/program him via remote.

HOWEVER, programming him via physical touch is pretty easy. We taught him new dances by living his arms up/down/left/right/forward/back manually, and he even records audio that you make while performing he dance. It makes it a cool novelty for little kids singing/dancing to music, more-so music that has commonly-known dances with it.

I wish there were some way to get him to sing with his robot voice. I also wish there were way to add customizable phrases, jokes, etc, in his robot voice. In my opinion, it loses all novelty when the custom movements are accompanied by your voice. I'd like to see Meccano put more effort into developing an app (preferably a PC app) that would help the user perform more detailed customization. If I could just have access to the movements of specific servos or customize his dictionary to get him to say what I want in his voice, I would rate this higher. The main problem is the fact that I have very limited access when it comes to programming Meccanoid. Most users probably wouldn't mind, and therefore wouldn't care for these features, but I'm a hardcore nerd and as of now am contemplating how to do this from a hacker/reverse engineering standpoint.

There is obviously some fine engineering put into the hardware/software onboard the Meccanoid. For example, none of the servos are labeled (the don't say elbow, shoulder, neck). There are 7 servos, but only plug into 3 ports on the mainframe. That leaves 3 open ports (for what use? I dunno!). Yet somehow, by daisy chaining the arm servos, the mainframe can tell which one is the elbow and which one is the shoulder. I'm guessing because it knows that the elbow is one more hop away than the shoulder, but still, very sophisticated and easy (there are minimal instructions, so in a way they HAD to make this easy). Yet almost all thought in the application layer for the user is misguided. They wanted to try and make it easy by using pictures and big icons to program/move him via the app, but this was executed poorly, and as a result I have little ability to add to Meccanoids movements/phrases.
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Neat toy, but very limited in what it can do. My kids got bored with it rather quickly.
by Frosty (3 out of 5 stars)
January 23, 2016

I think I was more excited about this than my son. I actually enjoyed putting this together. I think the robot is awesome, my son thinks it's awesome, but it just doesn't do much. I mean, it is extremely limited in what you can do with it. It took longer to put together than the length of time my kid had fun with it. The voice recognition is mediocre at best. It's like the robot is deaf. My kid just gets bored with it making it move the same as him, and programming moves in him. I gave it three starts because the product is cool, but just for a bit. The coolness comes back when someone who has never seen one comes over and you show them, but even they are like, "is that all it does". Well, yes, that's all it does.

The actual parts and pieces are built quite well, and once together the robot is quite sturdy. The movement of the arms and head are awesome.

As for putting it together, that's where I had a blast. I love things like this. If I could give you one piece of advise, it is to separate all the screws and nuts into separate bowls and mark the bowls. I found the instructions more than adequate. It's just pictures, but I found it to be easily understood. Now the wiring of the servos was a different story. The instructions were lacking on that department. Finally I figured out that for each arm you plug servos into each other then that last servo for each arm gets plugged into the control. Quite easy really, but they really don't divulge that information, and if you have never worked with servos before, how would you know? Devote a whole table or workbench to this, so if you have to walk away, you don't have to clean up. The hex head screw driver isn't of the highest quality. I found myself having to cut the end off three times, to get a nice tight fit into the screw heads again. But you could always purchase a better quality hex driver if you want.

Now, a few of the nuts were extremely hard to put on because of some very small tight conditions, but you have to use the wrench type tool that also came with the set, have some steady hands, and a bit of luck. A couple of them took me several tries to get the nut to stay on the wrench and move it onto the head of the bold, and try to turn the bolt. But it can be done, and I love a challenge.
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Very cool, fun to build, but lacks true "open source" that engineers are interested in. Becomes a cl
by CSharpDad (3 out of 5 stars)
February 21, 2016

First, this has the ability to be more then 3 star. This is a very cool toy. Great for learning and assembly of robots for our children. The instructions were great, a few issues (incorrect size nut/bolts in a couple spots), and my 7 year old picked it right up while I supervised her building it. We did have a lot of fun,and the built in functions of it when complete are very cool. But once you build this expensive robot, you don't want to be stuck with an expensive paperweight that you will end up sticking into the closet.

If you have no other reason than to assemble this and play with it.. then its 4-5 star right out of the box. But if you are like me, and want to take it to the next level... your going to be severely limited.

Pros:
- Easy to build - my 7 year old daughter did it with guidance
- Instructions for the most part are clear
- Its big, and cool looking.

The cons: This product advertises itself as "Open Source" -- ok.. I am a software developer... this is appealing to me. Maybe I should have looked at their website a little closer to see what that ment... but why... its open.. I'll be able to dig into it as soon as I get it assembled. Fast forward 11.5 hours of assembly (child put it together :) ). I am ready to bust out my surface and start coding for the device. I get on the company website, -- They have two documents.... one is a PDF on how to send high/low wire values (binary communication) to each of the motors.. Cool! That sounds like fun. Its a little oldschool, but I can do this. In the back of my head, I was thinking, man.. a UART would be so much nicer though, because I am going to have to control the speed of a GPIO on my own. Calculated down, its 2400 baud communication--- totally fine for 6 bytes of data per packet.

They also supply a C++ header/cpp file, which controls the digital signals on the GPIO of an Adreno. Cool, I guess... but wait.. what about the brain ?

What I learned about this is.. you cant code anything that comes with the device. The Meccabrain is a closed solution. They do not allow you to see any of that source code, and they don't allow you to know anything about the Bluetooth communication. I emailed their support about it, and they simply said no. Why not? Seriously, I don't want to be writing I/O to a GPIO pin... i would rather just send Bluetooth socket commands.. and control the brain from a wireless signal. Why do I need to go buy an Adreno with some realtime OS to control just one strand of arms. This is getting hacky here.

I was reading forums on this, People are interested and working to replace this brain with a real open source solution. Not sure if the following is true, but there was a rumor that Google was getting involved with this. That might be what we need, but just not in time for a presentation I was doing on robotics to a bunch of school kids.

Anyhow, the robot has potential to be 5 star, if the manufacture would release what we really want -- the ability to control the brain, not just the components.

I added a timelapse of my family building this on Youtube. Just search "Meccanoid g15 ks Timelapse assembly".
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Awesome!
by Sunndays in Seattle (5 out of 5 stars)
January 10, 2016

I debated about buying this because of the price but I am so glad that we bought it! My 9 year old is incredible with his curiousity and fascination with robotics and building. This was a perfect combination of both. He literally opened this robot and worked on it STRAIGHT for 13 hours until he finished it. He did have to rebuild and fix a few things but he did assemble it all by himself. He was very proud of himself after seeing the finished product. He also loves programming moves, having it tell him jokes, leading him around, and having him dance. He plays with it everyday. It can also be made into a couple of other things (dinosaur) but he said he doesn't want to change him yet. My son loves Legos, snap circuits, and this robot. If your kiddo loves any of those things it's a good bet they would love this toy.
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Great Robot
by Michael L. (5 out of 5 stars)
January 21, 2016

Awesome little robot. Does exactly what I expected. Make sure you take the time to properly read the instructions and give yourself plenty of time to build. I bought this for my severely autistic son to help with interaction. I like that I can program it with the movements I want and then play them back whenever I want. My son laughs and enjoys the interaction. The whole family uses and enjoys MeccaNoid. Bluetooth connection is good when you find a device it will work with. Had to use my daughters LG tablet for connection as my Galaxy Note5 would not connect.
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Great idea, but missing parts and nonexistent support!
by Roger Madison (1 out of 5 stars)
February 2, 2016

My boys were incredibly excited to build this robot together with me. After a few steps, pieces were missing, so I called. They never sent the replacement pieces. I found a workaround by spending several hours searching for screws that would work. Then, got to about 20% complete, and the screws provided were not long enough to connect with the nuts. Called support and got a message that they were closed for the Christmas holiday (this was late January). Today, 2/2/16, called again. Spent 27 minutes on hold and no one ever picked up. Don't waste your money!
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Great build, bad electronics..
by Nixy (2 out of 5 stars)
January 20, 2018

The build was great, a nice challenge for my 10 yr old and i to do together. The robot however is garbage. I am so disappointed in the issues we have had with it. 1st the meccabrain was defective. Spinmaster sent me a new upgrade free which was nice, but the battery pack or charger won't charge. So she still can't do anything with it! Another call to spinmaster on Monday i guess...
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Doesn't always work.
by B_stein8 (3 out of 5 stars)
January 13, 2018

For this amount of money it should be amazing. He only listens to commands about 1/2 the time. One of the arms doesn't work at all. The other only works sometimes. My son did put this together by himself (he's 14.5) so maybe he missed something and that caused the issues. I wish it was just a bit easier to control and put together though.
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The only thing I'd like to see is some API or protocol description for ...
by Robert Vanderwall (5 out of 5 stars)
January 7, 2017

Very well designed mechanics. Servos are surprisingly robust. The build in 'brain' has some very interesting and clever functionality. The voice module has a limited but somewhat interesting repertoire of phrases.

The only thing I'd like to see is some API or protocol description for the brain.
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Good Family Project - even your kid is not 10+
by amberleepk (4 out of 5 stars)
November 28, 2015

Our kid is 5.5 years old which is much younger than the box said 10+. We love robot so we decided to treat it as a family project that we do several steps every day. At the beginning, our kid didn't know how to do screw driver (most of the steps require screw driver) and we spent some time to practise the basic skills. We also explained how to read and use the instruction book. And after around 30 steps, he can read the instruction pretty well and do it by himself with our guidance at the side. As mentioned in the other reviews, it's a long construction process. He did give up at about 2/3 way through after 2 weeks. I tried to take the lead and show him the progress which gave him the excitement that we are almost there. He got his interest back again and we finished it after 3 weeks time. And then we face a pretty difficult situation for MeccaNoid to recognise my kid's voice. It seems that MeccaNoid can only recognise an adult voice (like daddy and my mummy voice) instead of a higher pitch kid's voice. So we practised again to use a lower thicker voice. Still have some failures in giving out commands but it's getting better now...

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