Raspberry Pi Pod and micro:bit base

Today, we have on the review workbench (well… kitchen table) the Makeblock Ultimate 2.0 robotics kit. I was sent this kit for free from the manufacturers, but they have not vetted or approved this review, so it will be an honest account.

TL;DR

This really is an awesome kit with high-quality parts and very good LEGO/Meccano-type instructions. It’s pricey at $350+VAT/£399 inc VAT, but in this instance you really do get what you pay for. For my full opinion, go to the bottom of the page. Also at the bottom of the page is a limited-time code for 10% off!

Packaging and unboxing

The package arrived in a large cardboard box. Inside that was another (very nicely designed) box with pictures and details of the kit.

It’s a sturdy box and feels very full. Let’s get inside it and see what the kit contains!

This is the first layer. I can already tell this is going to be high-quality stuff. There is a mixture of metal, Perspex and what I assume is injection-moulded parts along with motors, rubber wheels and a sophisticated and nicely produced ‘grabber’.

Underneath a layer of foam is another load of components including miscellaneous fixings, rubber tracks, the controller board, some tools, some cables and a cardboard box which contains lots of small add-ons and plug-in boards. It really does contain everything you need except the AA batteries.

I opened up the controller board anti-static bag to have a look:

It’s a very impressive controller board with, seemingly, everything broken out to ports and pins.

In terms of motors, there’s a micro DC motor embedded in the grabber, so I left that alone. There are also three DC motors of the barrel type, with attached encoders, of different torques and gear ratios:

That’s enough of an unboxing. Let’s look at the technical specifications of the kit.

Technical specifications

Going from the Makeblocks product page, I can tell you that the metal parts of the kit are anodized aluminium and that there are over 550 pieces. The main controller board is driven by an ATMEGA2560-16AU (which explains the plethora of ports and pins available on the board) and that the kit includes the following add-on boards:

• 4 x motor driver plug-in boards.
• Ultrasonic sensor.
• Line follower sensor.
• 3-axis accelerometer and gyro sensor.
• A shutter controller for a camera (one of the models you can make is a ‘camera dolly’ – I haven’t got a compatible camera, but for those that have, this is pretty cool!)
• A Bluetooth module that can be plugged into the main controller to give you wireless control.

Listed under interfaces on the page are the following:

• DC Motor Interface × 8
• Motor Driver × 4
• Servo Interface × 10
• Wireless Communication Module × 1 (this is the Bluetooth module I just mentioned)
• Power Output × 2
• Raspberry Pi Communication × 1 (not too sure what they mean, but maybe that will become clear! Serial, maybe?)
• Sensors or Modules Interface × 4

They list that the power supply is 12V, which is interesting because the included battery box is for 6 x 1.5V AA batteries – which is 9V. Perhaps it can take up to 12V – this would be useful to give the robots a bit more “grunt”.

Programming

It also lists that you can use Scratch to program the robots (it’s actually their version of Scratch called mBlock 5) and also “Arduino” which I assume means Arduino’s flavour of C. It would have been nice to be able to use Micropython, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Certainly, seeing as they state that the board is usable from a Raspberry Pi, you could use full-size Python to communicate with the ATMEGA chip. Instructions on how to connect and use it with a Raspberry Pi are here. (There’s also some stuff on GitHub as well, but I suspect they’re outdated and are replaced with the previous link!). It looks like it can be connected with a soldered-on header block or a USB cable (which is included), so we’re talking communication via serial link.

So far, so good in the case of components – it’s an Arduino-driven kit, so at least it will be familiar to adult makers (if not as user-friendly as Python), but there is the visual programming environment as well, so that will appeal to kids. Let’s move on to where the kit really takes off – the instructions!

Instruction manual

The instruction manual is a paper-and-staples affair, but it’s pretty thick and includes instructions for making three different types of robot as well as ideas for many more.

The instructions are clear, in a LEGO/Meccano way. In fact, the whole kit is reminiscent of Meccano, but a lot sturdier.

As you can see, where necessary the instructions are in English but mostly it is done using illustrations. There is a handy reference page (corner hastily folded down by me!) to help you to make sure that you’ve got the right sized part out of the different ones available. It can be very easy with this kit to pick the wrong screw or piece of metal, so always compare it to the 1:1 example pictures!

I thought the instructions were very good. It took me a few hours to build the crane/grabber robot, although I was taking pictures as I went along, as you will see…

Initial build of the crane/grabber

I was pretty fastidious doing this, and I think you have to be when it comes to this kind of kit and instructions. This first robot gives you a lot of the skills needed to be able to freestyle later, particularly how and when to use grub screws! That’s right – there are tiny grub screws to secure wheel hubs to the metal axles. You need a good level of motor control and attention to detail. I would say this isn’t a suitable kit for the very young on their own, for example, but certainly a child of, say, 8-10 with parental help would get along just fine with it.

One thing I particularly liked was that it tells you when you’re 50% of the way through, and 80% (although that’s pretty obvious!). This really helps you to divide your time and estimate how long it will take.

However, I will give a little criticism here. I did manage to mount the first arm piece (with the black wheel on it) the wrong way around – they frequently switch the viewpoint of the 3D illustrations so that sometimes the front is at the front, and sometimes it’s towards the back in the pictures. There are plenty of clues, but if one person (me!) managed to do it wrong, and I was really concentrating, then it’s just something to be aware of!

This is the completed crane/grabber (with the main lift wheel on the correct side!) As you can see, it’s really quite large!

It takes 6 x AA batteries (which aren’t included) and that connects to the controller board with a barrel jack, so if you wanted to you could change it for a different sort of battery, even a LiPo (I even used it tethered initially to make sure everything worked), but for now I just shoved in some Energizer batteries.

Video demo time!

Here’s a video of the robot I built in action. In this video, I am using the Android app on my mobile phone to remote control the robot.

This is just one robot build, of course. Here’s a selection of all the other robots that you can build with the kit, courtesy of Makeblock:

Clearly, this is all using a remote control (phone) at this point. However, they do include an ultrasonic distance sensor and a line follower sensor which you can use together with your robot build and some programming to do object detection and line following. If you paired it up with a Raspberry Pi (this is advanced level stuff!), you should be able to take input from a Pi camera to move towards, or avoid, specific objects/colours. It’s entirely up to you, and this kit will grow with you, allowing you to explore such ideas.

Opinion

In my opinion, this is one of the most comprehensive robotics kits out there. It’s not called “Ultimate” for nothing. It allows you to build a wide variety of robots, from those in the instruction manual to creations of your own. The ability to reprogram the robot to do your bidding is more advanced, but using the Scratch-alike visual programming environment will be familiar to kids and the use of Arduino C is familiar to most makers. If you pair it with a (admittedly hard to find, physically, at the moment) Raspberry Pi, you’ve opened up a whole new world of physical programming possibilities. There’s a whole load of programming instructions here.

The price – £399-ish (including VAT) in the UK, $350+VAT in the US or overseas, is very top-end. However, considering the sheer number of parts, the custom MegaPi Arduino board and the quality on display, I can understand how they justify that. It’s a complete robotics lab, if you like, and I can see this going down well in well-off families and private schools looking for a kit to use in class.

I’m looking forward to passing the kit on to a friend of mine who has two young children and seeing how they get on with it. Certainly, the proof of the kit’s quality and ease-of-use lies not in my hands, but in the hands of the young and in the hands of parents. Therefore, expect to see a follow-up review when my friend manages to get some time to look at the kit with his kids.

On the whole? Highly recommended if you can afford it!

Buying the kit

The kit is available from several retailers (make sure you get the v2 kit!), but Makeblock themselves have an Amazon store you can purchase from.

Until the end of April 2023, you can get the kit for £319.99 off by:

1. Ticking the “Apply 10% voucher” box on Amazon.
2. Using the code JIJEMVVV which gives you another 10% off.