The Mechanoid: A Flop of a Toy

I must say, I was thoroughly disappointed with the Meccano Mechanoid. This toy had all the makings of a great robotics kit - it's got arms that can move, LEDs that light up, and even a motion capture mode that uses your smartphone's camera to record your movements. However, despite its impressive features, the Mechanoid failed to deliver in terms of fun and educational value.

One of the biggest issues with the Meccano Mechanoid is that it lacks real programming capabilities. You can tell the robot to make noise and wave its arms around, but there's no way to actually program it or create complex movements on your own. This is a major drawback, especially for adults who might be interested in using the toy as a tool for learning about robotics. The lack of programming capabilities makes the Mechanoid feel more like a novelty toy than an actual educational resource.

Another problem with the Meccano Mechanoid is that it's just not very durable or well-made. It feels like it was thrown together without much care or attention to detail, and the parts are all very loosely connected. This means that the robot can be pretty flimsy and prone to breaking, especially if you try to use it in a way that's a little too aggressive.

One of the most frustrating things about the Meccano Mechanoid is its motion capture mode. This feature uses your smartphone's camera to record your movements, which sounds like it could be really cool. However, in practice, it just doesn't work very well at all. The robot will often get confused and start moving around wildly, even if you're not actually doing anything with your arms or hands. It's like the Mechanoid is just making things up as it goes along.

The Meccano Mechanoid also has a rather annoying tendency to flop its arms around even when they shouldn't be moving at all. This can be really distracting and takes away from the overall experience of using the toy. I found myself getting annoyed with the robot's antics more often than not, which made it hard for me to enjoy playing with it.

In contrast, traditional Meccano sets have always been a lot of fun to play with. The old Meccano sets were all about creativity and building, rather than just programming robots. They're great for kids who are interested in STEM subjects, but also enjoyable for adults who want to relax and build something cool.

I'm not the only one who's had issues with the Meccano Mechanoid, either. I recently read an article that revealed that the toy was designed by Spin Master, a company that's been accused of churning out cheap, poorly made toys. The article said that Spin Master's idea of "innovation" is to add lots of flashy colors and features to their products, even if they don't really work well.

Spin Master's approach to toy design seems to be all about making a quick buck rather than creating high-quality products that will last. This is especially sad, given the rich history of Meccano as a brand that has been around for over 100 years. It's hard to see what happened to the company, but it's clear that they've lost sight of what really matters when it comes to making great toys.

So what's the solution? Well, I think there's a much better way for Spin Master (and Meccano) to approach toy design. Instead of churning out cheap, poorly made products, why not focus on creating high-quality kits that are both fun and educational? A full metal robot with wheels, gears, axles, beams, LEDs, several motors, and a fully programmable brain would be an amazing product - one that would support STEM education and give kids (and adults!) the chance to build and create something really cool.

I think this is exactly what Spin Master should be doing. Instead of wasting money on toys like the Meccano Mechanoid, why not invest in making products that are both fun and educational? I'd love to see a full metal robot with all those features, priced competitively and designed for kids (and adults!) who want to learn about robotics and engineering.

In fact, I think there's an opportunity here for Spin Master (or Meccano) to redeem themselves. Instead of trying to make money off of poorly made toys like the Mechanoid, why not focus on creating products that are both fun and educational? With a little bit of creativity and attention to detail, it's possible to create something truly amazing.

The End

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: endesigned for kids aged 10 and up the mechanoid 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 mechanoid is great but let me tell you something the mechanoid is a terrible disappointment it's an offensively bad box of empty promises and all those positive reviews are only looking at the mechanoid at a superficial level it's gonna be pretty interesting for me to be the sole voice of descent on this one so let's get into it shall we i buy power's 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 mechanoid 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 four hundred dollars opening up the box for the mecanoid g15ks we see the 1188 pieces of which 961 are actually just nuts and bolts leaving 245 plastic pieces that actually comprise the robot itself now traditional meccano meccano meccano potato potato whatever meccano pieces are actually made out of metal but the mechanoid 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 meccano 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 piece's 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 mini 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 tried and true metal pieces that meccano was so well known for they still decided to keep the traditional nut and bolt 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 undergoes constant changes in orientation also sometimes you have to use a slightly different nut or bolts 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 mechanoid 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 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 mechanoid's 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 however it's not nearly as precise as the commercials would imply mechanoid is so easy to program i see robots what a fail it can't play the piano moving on to ragdoll avatar you can use your smartphone to directly remote control the movements of the mechanoid 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 mechanoid 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 plus plus you can program the mechanoid 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 mechanoid and this guy isn't 10 years old so why should his opinions matter well guess what i was a kid once and i remembered 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 pokemon game maker five 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 mechanoid 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 meccano 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 spin master 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 meccano lineup okay okay spin master i know you're watching and i've got something to say to you meccano has existed for over a hundred years because they made good quality long lasting interesting products please try to exercise some responsibility and restraint so that you don't completely drive them into the ground with flash in the pan products like the mechanoid and hey i've got a toy idea for you how about a full metal meccano 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 traders 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 that's what i actually sold when it was returned my money back if i'm lucky on that right okay thanks a lot you're welcome yeah bye-bye they won't even take it at toy traders if the mechanoid 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 mecanoid 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 meccano 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 four hundred dollars 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 timedesigned for kids aged 10 and up the mechanoid 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 mechanoid is great but let me tell you something the mechanoid is a terrible disappointment it's an offensively bad box of empty promises and all those positive reviews are only looking at the mechanoid at a superficial level it's gonna be pretty interesting for me to be the sole voice of descent on this one so let's get into it shall we i buy power's 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 mechanoid 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 four hundred dollars opening up the box for the mecanoid g15ks we see the 1188 pieces of which 961 are actually just nuts and bolts leaving 245 plastic pieces that actually comprise the robot itself now traditional meccano meccano meccano potato potato whatever meccano pieces are actually made out of metal but the mechanoid 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 meccano 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 piece's 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 mini 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 tried and true metal pieces that meccano was so well known for they still decided to keep the traditional nut and bolt 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 undergoes constant changes in orientation also sometimes you have to use a slightly different nut or bolts 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 mechanoid 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 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 mechanoid's 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 however it's not nearly as precise as the commercials would imply mechanoid is so easy to program i see robots what a fail it can't play the piano moving on to ragdoll avatar you can use your smartphone to directly remote control the movements of the mechanoid 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 mechanoid 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 plus plus you can program the mechanoid 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 mechanoid and this guy isn't 10 years old so why should his opinions matter well guess what i was a kid once and i remembered 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 pokemon game maker five 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 mechanoid 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 meccano 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 spin master 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 meccano lineup okay okay spin master i know you're watching and i've got something to say to you meccano has existed for over a hundred years because they made good quality long lasting interesting products please try to exercise some responsibility and restraint so that you don't completely drive them into the ground with flash in the pan products like the mechanoid and hey i've got a toy idea for you how about a full metal meccano 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 traders 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 that's what i actually sold when it was returned my money back if i'm lucky on that right okay thanks a lot you're welcome yeah bye-bye they won't even take it at toy traders if the mechanoid 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 mecanoid 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 meccano 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 four hundred dollars 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\n"