I'm 35 years old software development engineer with no robot building experience. Purchased just to play around.
Nice adult toy to play with, challenging. Has issues, see below. Be ready to DIY (do it yourself) and FIY (fix it yourself) :-)
Pros:
- Affordable
- Cool puzzle to build :-)
- Definitely educational
- A lot of components out of the box: camera, ultrasonic, gyro, leds, 13 servos
- Vanilla packed parts (no repack), so you can imagine yourself building from parts ordered separately
Cons:
- My robot after construction has failed servo tests. Some servos did not properly react on control signal. Support require photos and videos, so be ready to provide them to get new parts shipped. Parts are shipped from China, shipping to NJ took 12 days, for example. Anyway, if it doesn't work, then it is easier to return it rather than trying to obtain spare parts. Received parts did not improve situations. I have dive deep on my own what is causing the issue and found that default calibration for servos is incorrect. I have updated Servo.py to properly set angle from 0 to 180 and now all servos started to work well and device has passed finally the servo test.
- Picky to PSU (power adapter). Compatible PSU doesn't come with robot. Refused to charge from 5V@3A SMRAZA PSU that can power RPi4 without issues. Refused to charge from USB ports on my power strip. Accepted to charge from iPhone charger. Charger on robots shows blinking white D4 on incompatible PSU but in instructions it is outlined as "damaged battery" condition. Thats not true.
- Picky to Battery. Compatible batteries are not included with robot, instructions are not clear what are the best batteries to use with robot. I have purchased IMREN 3500 batteries as they recommended in documentation, but integrated charger charges them too slow and it doesn't properly report charge level. 100% charged battery is reported as 75% (3/4) in my case. The battery that works well is reported as has 0% charge. I have verified the charge level on Nitecore D4.
- Hard to detach batteries once attached to charge externally. Why charge externally? See previous bullet point. Have to use screwdriver to pull back batteries. Any accidental physical damage to lithium battery could cause short-circuit in battery and battery fire. Definitely not designed for safety. I advise to learn how to deal with lithium batteries on fire in advance ;-) just to be ready for worst case scenario.
- The software is crap. The client is crashing periodically (may be just on mac, did not test on windows) with segfault. Video streaming doesn't work as well (again, mac). Default servos calibration is not sane.
- Some assemble steps are hard to do without having tiny fingers :-)
- Instructions could be much better. A lot of water in instructions, some statements are incorrect or misleading.
Tips:
- Follow instructions where "tape" is mentioned. Tape in right place could save a lot of time because tape will hold nut in the places where it is hard to hold nuts using fingers.
- If servo test doesn't work, I would recommend to edit "Servo.py" and replace "4096 * ((angle * 10) + 850) / 20000" with "120 + (510 - 120) * (angle / 180)"
- Don't trust battery charge indicator
- Don't trust battery damage indicator
- Use PSU from phone charger
- Don't use IMR batteries (charge level, charger and damage indicator is not correct for them), try regular Samsung dig discharge current batteries
- To achieve best results you need to properly center servos on 90 degrees position. If you can't get that then try these two advices:
a) swap servos - some servos could fit better specific position than others
b) rotate white disk servo arm on 180 degrees - it could work better for some positions
- If you see missing or damaged parts - return and order new one. It is faster than contacting Freenove support and wait for 12 days, especially, if you have just 30 days to return.
I have removed 2 stars because:
- Support is more confusing than helping. Asks to run experiments, swap servos, swap pins, etc then record videos and take photos and upload to them. Finally, not being able to detect root cause - they are sending new parts with 12 days shipping from China. And new parts once arrived did not fix the issue.
- I have to fix provided software on my own manually to get it working.
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