MECCANO-Erector Meccanoid G15

Purchased this in July for my 13 year old son's birthday. He seemed interested in robotics, so we wanted to start him off with something not too expensive, and simple yet challenging enough. This was perfect.My son and I worked on it together. The husband attempted to help, but in many cases, dad's fingers were too big to finagle certain parts of the assembly. A 13 year old CAN do this alone, but my son is a natural born gamer (le sigh), and he didn't care to work on the bot much unless I gave him company.In total, I'd guess we spent eight-nine ish hours throughout the summer assembling it. We had a few moments where we'd have to backtrack, unscrew, and re-screw, something, but for the most part, the assembly directions are pretty darn easy to follow. Our robot does have one black and one gray leg, oops. The neck piece is supposed to be black, and the two legs gray, but all of those pieces are the same in shape and size. Just pay close attention to details and you'll be fine! Our mistake didn't change how it operates.All pieces and tools were included. Had zero issues with that.Once he was fully assembled, we popped some batteries in, and he came to life. It was kind of gratifying, I won't lie! We are still on our first set of batteries, though we don't leave him on all day long, nor every day. If it helps, I do believe there is a huge difference in battery life when you aren't buying them at the dollar store. I purchased Energizer brand, and our robot is still going, and going, and going.I know the robot has been discontinued, but the newer models are very similar. It's makes a wonderful gift that cures boredom and puts a kid's brain in motion. I may just buy the larger version for all of my kids to work on next summer! We love our little bot.

Great project to share with a little one. If you are looking for a toy to hand to your kid and keep them occupied for a while, I would probably not recommend this. It has a lot of pieces (600+ for this version and 1000 pieces for the bigger one from same company) and requires a bit of patience and following the well written instructions to assemble.I have an 11yr old son and it was an Excellent fun time to SHARE together building this. It probably takes approx 3-5hrs to put it together, we did it over 2 days on and off, and filled the entire kitchen table with all the parts neatly sorted for assembly. Once we put it together, he absolutely loves this thing, between the voice commands, programming, etc.The instructions were well written, if you get stuck, there are plenty of YouTube videos on the manufacturer website to help. Once assembled, the toy feels solid and well made, and works equally well

I normally do not write product reviews, unless its to warn people of a bad product. Today I am making an exception. I am an electrical engineer and build robots for fun, so I knew when I saw this I had to have it. I ended up paying $40 or so via Amazon Warehouse and it arrived in 2 days via prime shipping. I spent 5 hours building while watching netflix. Was not that hard of a build but had some tight fitting spots with my fingers to hold nuts. This is the first time I have ever used plastic erector set pieces, they seem like they will hold up for a while. I have used metal ones in plenty of my robot builds and they are heavy so require a lot of power to move. These pieces are very light weight, so less power consumptiin moving them around with motors and servos. The servos are very high quality and Mecchano even provides pin out spec sheets on their website to use for custom arduino builds. For the $40 i spent I couldnt buy the 4 smart servos alone much less all the other parts. It is a great toy and learning piece. I would fully recommend at least one of these in anyones collection if they enjoy tinkering. I plan on ordering a few more for my workshop for parts to use for other projects.

This toy is difficult to put together. My 7 year old could not do it.As others have posted, you have to yell at the toy to get it to respond to your voice commands. The voice commands frequently don't work.The toy really doesn't do very much. For over $100 I expected to able to program it. You really can't program it. It has a mode that will record your voice and the motions of the arms but that is all.The blue tooth application constantly crashes and loses it's ability to control the toy. I thought that at least this mode would make the toy fun to play but it just ended up being frustrating.I have no idea what to do with this toy. It has sat in my son's room for over 6 months unused. I have hope that someone will someday post a method to hack the brain or something but until then I would not recommend buying this toy.

Took some building... probably half of the 600 pieces are nuts and bolts, and some go in positions where it's tough to hold them in place to put them together (at least with man-sized fingers).But, it's worth it. The robot responds to voice commands and has a wide repertoire of dance and karate moves, very entertaining for my 9-year-old son. Plus, with the free iPhone app, you can control and record movements easily (you can record without the app, but it's a bit more work). Once recorded, you can command the robot to play them back, making for much fun.Be prepared to stock up on C batteries. It only took 2 days to use up the first set. Rechargables would be a good investment.Very cool toy!