Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “MU Spacebot Educational Robot Review”.
Thanks for joining me again today, we’re going to have a little bit of fun, putting together a robot kit. While i was at maker faire sean in china, i came to a table and was looking at these cute little wooden robots and they turned and looked back at me. They had face tracking and i thought it was really cool. So i stopped to check them out and what i found were the mu spacebot. This little robot is an educational platform that has facial tracking, a simple body and a head that can move up and down, left and right, just a simple gimbal, there’s 60 or 70 dollars depending on.
If you get the kit with bluetooth or not, and they come with everything, you need to build them in the box now they are labeled as an educational robot, so you can reprogram them with something that looks like scratch, we’ll check that out after we build it, But first, let’s just put the thing together. So do i like you, i see you hey all right, hey, okay, now that i’ve got the bot built. Let’S talk about what i liked and what i didn’t like. I was actually really impressed by how tightly the pieces fit together. I know that seems like a silly thing to be impressed about, but i’ve put together a few laser cut kits and there’s varying degrees of wiggle and slop. This entire kit is just held together by how tightly those those pieces fit, which is pretty impressive.
The the way the buttons work on the top was a kind of kind of cool concept as well. Another thing that was pretty neat was that it had everything that you needed to put it together in the box. Now you’ll notice it uses these tiny itty, bitty, plastic, nuts and uh machine screws, and it even has a little laser cut wooden wrench to be able to tighten those down. That’S really cool the face tracking is fun.
It’S really exciting. For people to be able to have their face tracked, it seemed to work better if i was further away from it and the uh the the searching that it does makes it kind of hard, sometimes to tell if it’s tracking your face or just looking around uh. But whenever it is working, it’s really impressive and it catches people’s attention. I also liked that it came with some blank versions of the stickers so that you could color your own designs to customize your little robot okay, now for the negative stuff.
Unfortunately, i was never able to program this little bot with my phone. I hooked it up with the usb loaded, the app and it could never find it. I emailed tech support.
They told me to make sure that the adapter was on the phone side. I tried that it still didn’t work as it turns out this phone, and many phones aren’t compatible with otg connections like that over usb. Unless you root them – and that’s not where i’m going to spend my time on this project rooting the phone – and i wouldn’t expect a teacher to have to deal with that either.
So i would highly recommend getting the bluetooth version. If you were going to buy this bot, which brings me to really my only complaint um, which is, i would have liked to have had software, that i could load in a browser or on a computer instead of using an ipad or an android device, or something Like that, in most of the classrooms that i’ve been in, they have chromebooks or computers that they’re using and having software on the computer, i think, would have been a better option in addition to what they already had. The uh programming itself is all done in an interface much like scratch and is pretty easy, so yeah i mean, i think, i’d recommend this to a teacher for sure at 70, it’s a decent price for a considerably fun little robot, and i really think just the Facial recognition really pushes it over the edge into capturing people’s imagination and uh. Getting the kids excited so anyway.
That’S it! That’S it for the mu space bot hope you enjoyed the video, be sure to give us a thumbs up and subscribe to this website. You .