The Second Version of the Designer From Xiaomi

Less than a year lat­er, Xiao­mi releas­es the sec­ond ver­sion of the con­struc­tor with the abil­i­ty to pro­gram. If in the first ver­sion of the con­struc­tor the main empha­sis was placed on the gyro­scope and two-wheeled mod­els, then the sec­ond ver­sion is focused on the cater­pil­lar mod­el. For more detailed infor­ma­tion, I invite you to…

Characteristics

Packaging and equipment

There are almost no spe­cial dif­fer­ences from the first ver­sion in the pack­age. Well, except that the pic­tures have become com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent =).

In the upper com­part­ment there are two dri­ves and a main con­trol unit with a bat­tery inside.

Beneath it are a dozen plas­tic bags with var­i­ous parts of the robot.

On the back of the pack­age there is only a small stick­er with the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the device.

Each group of parts is sealed in a small bag. I rec­om­mend that you do not imme­di­ate­ly dis­close them, and do not throw them into one pile.

And spread out in a spe­cial plas­tic con­tain­er with cells that comes with the kit.

In my own expe­ri­ence of assem­bling the first ver­sion, when I poured all the parts into the box, the assem­bly was delayed for +2 hours. After that, to assem­ble the dinosaur, I already laid out the indi­vid­ual parts in their “com­part­ments” — it turns out much faster this way.

The con­struc­tor is declared as 10+, but thanks to the rather detailed instruc­tions, my 7‑year-old child assem­bled his part of the robot with almost no prob­lems.

Paper instruc­tions, as in the first ver­sion, only for assem­bling the main mod­el. In order to assem­ble the oth­er two mod­els, you need a smart­phone, there are already instruc­tions for two offi­cial mod­els to down­load. I will talk about the mobile appli­ca­tion a lit­tle fur­ther.

To recharge the 1650 mAh bat­tery built into the main unit, the kit includes a 12V — 1A pow­er sup­ply. The store for­got to put in an adapter for our plugs.

For recharg­ing, one of the 4 USB Type‑C ports on the back of the smart box is used.

Chas­sis dri­ves are com­plete­ly sim­i­lar to the first mod­el. Var­i­ous fas­ten­ing options on the front and back with a small wheel that can rotate in two direc­tions.

They are con­nect­ed to the unit using a 15 cm cable with USB Type‑C.

The main con­trol unit of the robot, brains and heart. On the top of the hole under which the speak­er is locat­ed, yes the robot can make var­i­ous sounds.

Front pan­el on/off but­ton and micro­phone hole. In the­o­ry, the robot can be con­trolled by voice, but no mat­ter how we tried to do it, we did not suc­ceed. There may be firmware updates that are released quite often.

At the back there are 4 USB Type‑C ports for con­nect­ing the chas­sis and oth­er sen­sors:

• Infrared sen­sor;
• Ultra­son­ic sen­sor;
• col­or sen­sor;
• Wi-Fi 2.4G wire­less net­work mod­ule.

At the bot­tom of the holes for var­i­ous mount­ing com­bi­na­tions.

On the right side there is a hole with a but­ton to reset the robot to fac­to­ry set­tings. After a year of work­ing with the first ver­sion, I nev­er had to use this reset.

Assembly

What is inter­est­ing about the first and sec­ond parts of the con­struc­tor is not only the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate a mod­el con­trolled from the phone, but also to tell the child about var­i­ous mech­a­nisms on the fin­gers. Dif­fer­en­tial exam­ple.

We begin to assem­ble the robot around the chas­sis mod­ule.

Don’t for­get the worm gear.

And it will trans­mit torque to the front steer­ing wheel through the car­dan shaft, which is locat­ed inside the two mod­ules.

Do not for­get about the need to con­nect the dri­ve mod­ules to the unit, for this we care­ful­ly thread the cables inside the “skele­ton” of the robot.

Lit­tle by lit­tle, the robot acquires var­i­ous parts and oth­er fix­tures.

We pro­ceed to the assem­bly of the chas­sis with road wheels.

We attach to the skele­ton of the robot. All fas­ten­ers are very strong, some­times in order to get a part stuck in the wrong hole, it was nec­es­sary to use nar­row-nose pli­ers, since it is very dif­fi­cult to pull out with fin­gers even for an adult.

But since the robot will be com­bat, we begin to hang it with “armor”.

Even the engine com­part­ment was not for­got­ten to cov­er.

A few more hang­ing items. All parts are FULLY lego com­pat­i­ble.

The sim­plest, but at the same time tedious pro­ce­dure is the assem­bly of the cater­pil­lar.

After 15 min­utes, the cater­pil­lar is installed in its right­ful place.

When assem­bling, I was only sur­prised at the thought­ful­ness in all the lit­tle things, and how some­thing robot-like grows from 1086 parts before our eyes.

We put aside the low­er part and pro­ceed to the assem­bly of the com­bat part of the robot. Quite painstak­ing­ly and long, as there are a lot of small parts that need to be assem­bled from many even small­er parts.

After 40–50 min­utes of assem­bly, the head of our com­bat robot is already loom­ing.

The mouth of a ter­ri­ble robot. In fact, the but­ton for turn­ing on the robot is hid­ing there, but the idea is inter­est­ing.

Well, what kind of robot with­out weapons — we col­lect machine guns.

The hands have their own mech­a­nism, thanks to which they can be raised or low­ered along the body of the robot.

The upper part of the robot is ready, it remains to insert only the main block into it and “revive” the robot.

We insert the block and fix it with pins from below.

Hands can not only be raised up / down with the help of a twister in the form of a black gear, but also spread apart or slight­ly bent.

All in all it took about 6 hours. Some parts of the design­er remained, they will be use­ful either for the remain­ing 2 mod­els, but some are spare in case of loss.

Appearance

The result is such a for­mi­da­ble com­bat robot on a cater­pil­lar track.

If nec­es­sary, you can eas­i­ly open the hood and change the robot­’s oil and oth­er antifreeze =)

Mobile app

Down­load and install MiTuBuilder from Play­Mar­ket. It is in Eng­lish, if desired, on 4pda, as far as I remem­ber, there is also a Rus­si­fied ver­sion. After that, we con­nect to the robot via Blue­tooth and the set­up is com­plet­ed. The appli­ca­tion itself has an inter­face that is under­stand­able even to a child and large but­tons.

• Build­ing a route — we guide the tra­jec­to­ry with a fin­ger, and the robot will repeat it.
• Gamepad mode, or with the help of vir­tu­al sticks or using the smart­phone’s gyro­scope, we con­trol the robot.
• In pro­gram­ming mode, you can set the sequence of actions and var­i­ous con­di­tions, and/or/if, etc.
• When buy­ing a new sen­sor, for exam­ple, col­or, you need to reg­is­ter it in the appli­ca­tion and reg­is­ter it in the “brains” of the robot.
• Var­i­ous instruc­tions.
• Voice con­trol.

In the set­tings there is a small FAQ, instruc­tions for reset­ting and cal­i­brat­ing the gyro­scope and oth­er man­u­als.

Con­trol mode.

There are already a lot of assem­bly instruc­tions, both from offi­cials and cus­tom ones.

Pro­gram­ming mode. It seems not very dif­fi­cult, but for a child at least 10 years old.

Video review

In gen­er­al, I can rec­om­mend both the first and sec­ond ver­sions of the con­struc­tor as an alter­na­tive to Lego. In the first robot, I attrib­uted only the gyro­scope to the minus­es, although you can’t make a nor­mal car, but the pres­ence of two design­ers and a lit­tle imag­i­na­tion open up a huge field for activ­i­ty from var­i­ous robots to trac­tors with trail­ers and carts. I would have this con­struc­tor at 12–14 years old, but what about the mod­els that I assem­bled, I could still man­age .…

You can buy here — AliEx­press

For exam­ple, to make such a dump truck and dri­ve it …