 Ever since I and the rest of Linus Media Group signed up for CES 2014, I've received hundreds, perhaps thousands of spammy promotional emails. It's mostly nonsense and garbage products, and I've been clearing it out as usual when one of them finally caught my eye. Meet the MBOT, a $49 STEM educational robot for children. I've been interested in robotics ever since I was a kid, so let's find out if the MBOT can live up to its promise of one robot per child. First things first, $49 is just the Kickstarter price. If you want an MBOT today, it'll cost you $79. That doesn't include shipping, and on top of that, I had to pay DHL $20 in import fees from Taiwan. And I'm not the only one. Anyway, let's take a look at what we get in the box. There's the mCore microchip, which is the brain of the robot, ultrasonic and light sensors, a Bluetooth module if you have the Bluetooth version, two gears that will be used as wheels, two motors to power the wheels, a little ball wheel, a battery pack, a single piece aluminum chassis, an IR remote with no included battery, a testing mat, a motor shaft repair kit, an instructional booklet, a screwdriver, and some screws, bolts, and cables. Assembly is supposed to take 10 easy minutes, but it took me longer for a couple of reasons. Like, why are the instructions supposed to be read clockwise? Also, the included screwdriver is only compatible with one type of screw, there's no easy way to tighten the bolts, and the instructions fail to mention that there's a hex wrench on the other side of the screwdriver bit. Once the mCore microchip has been screwed on, detaching the Velcroed on battery pack and managing cables is quite difficult since there's not much room. Also, one of the wires on one of my motors was completely detached. This was an easy fix for me, but I did some research and it turns out the quality assurance on the motors in particular has been a problem for MakeBlock before. Anyway, with the robot assembled, it's finally time to download and install the InBlock software, but first you have to manually install Adobe Air if you don't have it already. Then you can install the InBlock software, but according to the video instructions, before I can get to programming, there's still more I need to do. First, I need to select the MBOT board, then select the MBOT extension, then you have to select COM28 as the serial port. I looked everywhere for COM28 until realizing that it's referring to a USB port and COM4 works just as well. And then you have to update the firmware, and after that you still have to download, install, and link Arduino drivers until finally you can start uploading code to the MBOT. That's a lot of steps to go through before you've even started programming. Sure, it all seems obvious once you know what to do, but the MBOT is supposed to be a starter robot for children. Kids, and Linus Media Group employees, need very clear comprehensive instructions with as few steps and as little frustration as possible. Anyway, I finally got to programming with the MBlock software. Now, this is actually a modified version of Scratch, which was developed by MIT to teach kids about programming. Scratch is pretty cool, and it reminds me of when I was a kid learning programming with Game Maker 5. The Scratch programming automatically converts itself into Arduino code, which is ready to be uploaded onto the MBOT. I think that's pretty cool since it makes it easy to see exactly what the graphical Scratch programming looks like in real text-based code. Anyway, I went through all the videos and programmed the MBOT as instructed, and I tried a bunch of my own programming. Programming the MBOT is mostly straightforward, but only when it works. More on that later. The video tutorials give you a few ideas of what the MBOT can do, but I ran out of tutorials quickly and I found myself thinking, is that all? The most interesting things you can do, in no particular order, are follow a line, crudely, avoid obstacles, and remote control the MBOT with the remote or Bluetooth. You can also make colored LEDs flash and make noise with the buzzer, but you don't really need a robot for that. And you can detect the ambient brightness of the room with the included light sensor on the MCore, but I don't really see the point, and even the associated tutorial doesn't do anything with it except display the value on screen. I feel like it would have been better to use this in place of the current two bottom-mounted line-following light sensors, which can only detect black or white, meaning that it only has four states, zero, one, two, and three. This makes smooth PID line-following impossible. Also, I don't see that there's any way to do more than one thing at a time, like flashing LEDs while simultaneously line-following. Two different things which shouldn't interfere, but they do. It all gets lumped together. This is because of the decision to base the MBOT on Arduino, which doesn't support multi-threading. Bummer. I mean, maybe this is all just an issue of expectation management. The Kickstarter campaign really had me excited for the MBOT, but you need additional hardware to do some of the cool things they show off. The stock MBOT only assembles in one way, and it comes with just two motors for the two wheels, though the RJ25 ports can support more motors. If you want extra sensors or a robotic arm for your MBOT, you'll have to buy those. This is par for the course when it comes to robotics, but because of the MBOT's single-piece aluminum chassis, it's not nearly as modular as other robotics kits. This may be a good or a bad thing, depending upon what you want the MBOT for. The hardware is fine. It's the MBLOC software that has issues. It was frustrating to install, and even more frustrating to use. Sometimes the MBOT wouldn't be detected, and sometimes it wouldn't accept code. And here's a strange problem. It seems like after you upload your first Arduino code to the MBOT, certain scratch script modules no longer work, even though they previously did work, as shown in the video tutorials. Also, at some point I lost the ability to upload code from my work computer completely. I kept getting this error. Also, I could never get the ultrasonic sensor to work. No matter what computer I used, I kept getting the error, undefined reference to CountPulseASM. I told MakeBlock about my software problems, and they quickly updated the software. Now the ultrasonic sensor works, and I can upload code from my work computer again. That's great. But then all my LED programming became non-functional, and I had to redo it. There are still other issues with the software. I sincerely hope that these remaining problems can also be resolved. If they are, the MBOT could be a worthwhile purchase. Overall, I spent more time trying to get the MBOT to work than I did actually programming and using it. Now there's a graphic on the Kickstarter page favorably comparing the MBOT to three other competing robotic systems. At first glance it looks like the MBOT is clearly superior. Then you look a little closer and realize, wait a minute, an RGB LED isn't a sensor. Neither is a buzzer. And these other robots are poorly represented. For example, the LEGO Mindstorms educational base set has a ton of stuff not listed in this graphic. There's a touch sensor, lots of gears, wheels, and beams, an integrated display with buttons, a speaker, and enclosed PCB, and three servo motors with built-in tachometers for a total of nearly 500 parts with nearly unlimited ways to assemble it all. Of course it's a more expensive $250, and this came out eight years ago. The Parallax Arduino Shield seems like a much more fair comparison, and it certainly looks like the MBOT has much better hardware for less money. But I can't say for sure since I've never used the Parallax Arduino Shield robot kit. I've also never used the VEX IQ robot. But hey, VEX, Parallax, LEGO, Tetrix, if you guys want to send any of your robots to us for a review, go right ahead. I'll review it. Get in here. So anyway, here's the question. If the MBOT really was $50 total, and if all the problems with the software were resolved, would the MBOT be a worthwhile purchase? Sure. At that point, the only issue I can see is that any kid who's really interested in robotics is going to quickly outgrow the MBOT because of its limited hardware and singular method of construction. That makes a product like the MBOT more appropriate for educational settings where kids can learn everything they can from it and then move on to bigger and better things, allowing the next group of kids to have their turn. It's not necessary for every single child to own an MBOT since every kid is not going to care about robotics. So if you or your child or your class is interested in robotics, I cannot recommend the MBOT. There are plenty of more well-established brands for you to choose from, like VEX Robotics, Tetrix, Mindstorms, and so on. I recommend that you spend the extra money and get a robotics kit that will allow a much greater range of learning and experimentation. And on the subject of fixing things and putting stuff together, today's episode sponsor is iFixit. You've probably used or at least read one of the thousands of in-depth teardowns or guides available on their site, but what you might not know is that they also have a great line of professional electronics tools. The crown jewel of their lineup is the ProTech Toolkit, which I use quite a bit and Linus gets pretty annoyed when I misplace it. It's got over 70 tools, including a 54-bit driver kit, nylon and metal spudgers, spudgers? Spudgers? An anti-static wrist strap and lots more. Whether you're fixing a handheld system like a 3DS or shield or trying to disassemble a gaming monitor like Linus did in this video, or if you just want to improve your PC building experience with a better set of tools, the ProTech Toolkit is a great choice. It's available for only $64.95 from iFixit, but if you use our offer code LINUSTECH, you can save $10 on any purchase of $50 or more. So head on over to our link, that's iFixit.com LINUS and save on some awesome tools today. So what do you guys think? Was I too hard on the MBOT? Do you have one? And if so, what do you think about it? Are you guys interested in seeing more videos about robotics in the future? And how do you feel about me, Taren, as a host? Hello, by the way, if you haven't seen me before, let us know in the comments. Anyway, time for Linus' new outro. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon, buying a cool t-shirt like this one, or with a direct monthly contribution. Now that you're done doing all that, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little I button up in the top right hand corner to check out Thug Life Daydream, which, well, you're just gonna have to see it on our other channel, Channel Superfun. I'll see you around.