Makeblock The Good And The Less Good, But Still Pretty OK

I kickstarted the manufacturing run for Makeblock (http://www.makeblock.cc) and finally received my kit in the mail last week.

The good:

The aluminum extrusions, brackets and timing pulleys that came with the kit are really well done. They are exactly what I expect. The Arduino clone, "Meduino", that it ships with is well manufactured and is recognized correctly by the Arduino programming environment as an Uno. The the Makeblock Arduino shield with the sensor connectors and motor driver is also well constructed. My kit came with the Line Finder module, the IR Receiver module, and a simple IR remote control. All of the cables for connecting the modules to the shield and the Meduino to my laptop were included (two short phone lines and a usb cable). The kit also included all of the tools needed to work with the connectors (except a wrench for working with the standoffs). The connectors include various length m4 button head bolts, m4 nuts,  m3 headless set screws and m3 countersunk machine screws. There is a 6 AA battery holder and acrylic mounting plates for the Meduino and the battery holder. There are also supposed to be two sizes of plastic rivets for connecting the Meduino and the battery holder to their mounting plates.

The modules are color coded to the ports on the shield, which is very convenient. If the port on the shield has the module's color on it's label then you can plug that module into that port and it will work.

It took me about 5 minutes to completely assemble the chassis for the robot which has two 25mm motors and a caster. The parts all connected as expected (with the exception of the battery holder to it's mounting plate.)

They have provided a huge number of libraries and sample projects for the Makeblock shield and it was a matter of 30 seconds to open, compile and upload the line finder robot code to the Meduino. It didn't really work, more on that later. I then switched out the line finder module for the IR receiver module and uploaded the IR robot sketch to the Meduino. This took about 1.5 minutes which included unplugging the line finder, plugging the ir receiver in, bolting the ir receiver to the chassis, and uploading the sketch. The IR Robot sketch worked flawlessly. I then drove the robot around my house while my two year old yelled, "Whoa! ROBOT!" and tried to help it along by blowing on it.

The last awesome thing is that the module boards have a place to solder on jumpers if you would like to use them with a bread board or with out the Makeblock shield.

The less good:

I didn't receive the larger sized plastic rivets for connecting the battery holder to it's mounting plate. The recommendation from the support email address was to use the m3 screws to mount the battery holder to the mounting plate, but there are no m3 bolts so that won't work... that and the nuts would have to go on the mounting plate side, which would make it difficult to mount the plate on the chassis.

The documentation sometimes conflicts, specifically the documentation for the Line Finder Module and the actual libraries that support the module. The documentation correctly states that that the line finder will read LOW when over a black line and HIGH when over a reflective surface (white), but the documentation for the actual module says that the indicator LEDS for each sensor will be ON when the sensor is reading a black line and OFF when it is not. That isn't true. They are off when they are over a black line. But it took about an hour to suss that out, combined with the fact that I wasn't sure which piece was wrong. The line reader sensitivity isn't adjustable that I can see anywhere (no pot, no method in the library). It will not read magic marker on white paper. It will read toner on white paper at wide range of distances from the paper between 1 and 2 cm. It will read construction paper on white paper but only at a specific rage with a really low variance.

All in all that is a small gripe.

Conclusion:

I'm happy with the makeblock platform so far. The documentation is a little engrishy and it is not as consistent or complete as it could be. I plan on introducing it to some 8 - 10 year olds at Coder Dojo Indy in the next couple of months and I'm excited to try out some of the other sensors and controllers to really get a feel for what is possible with the platform. Ultimately each module color corresponds to a type of input (analog/digital/discrete/serial I think) and building your own module board shouldn't be that hard.