GE frens, time for a long rant. I'm trying to get Miniwatts into robotics and despite this being a halcyon age for low-cost robotics hardware and powerful computing devices, I'm very very underwhelmed by the Mbot2 and, by extension, many other consumer-level robot kits.
My biggest issue isn't that the hardware is lousy, and in fact I think it's pretty amazing what you can get for a reasonable price including decent batteries, motors, and some very cool sensor technology. Rather, it's the difficulties I'm having in the software side that really lets you convert these robots from cool toys into educational and scientific tools.
The biggest issue I'm having right now is simply getting the janky-Chinese web based programming interface to let me transfer Python programs over to the Arduino-based controller. This isn't even about the programming documentation, which I can find, it's simply an interface that doesn't want to work for serial data transfers even after I have confirmed that everything is setup and the hardware connects.
Another issue I'm having is that the Android app for this robot -- which is being sold right now on Amazon -- is so out of date that the Play Store won't even let me install it. Similarly, the Windows-only desktop software is woefully out of date. As such, I can't even MacGyver a solution with my phone or another tablet.
I'm nearing the point of jumping on a full-blown RasPi based system where I have more control, but even there I'm seeing lots of complaints about the software just not being up to snuff for many uses. It appears that there's a huge gap between glorified toys and systems that are so complex that you need to train your own AI models to get them to do anything (yes, AI models are being put directly on the RasPi boards now).
I'm looking for a system that is open but also accessible so I can introduce Miniwatts to relatively straightforward code that has a direct effect on how the robot operates so he can see the cause-effect relationship that really gets kids (and me!) excited about programming. Maybe we'll get to crazy AI nonsense later, but right now I'd just like the basics to work right. [END RANT]