“Brilliant for a lego enthusiast who's also learning micro:bit and robotics for the first time. The online instructions were easy to follow, and with some support from his Dad (me), my 8 year old son was driving his first robot around the house with much excitement. We looked up how to control it remotely using Bluetooth from a tablet (look up the EV-Micro:Bit app on android, and add the Bluetooth extension in makecode), and we got it working pretty quickly.”
“My daughter and I were very excited about this kit. We've been enjoying coding for the microbit, and we're also very keen on Lego, so we were very enthusiastic about being able to combine the two.
Unfortunately the kit seems to have some basic flaws. The first problem we encountered was that once the first model was assembled there was no way to access the USB port or the port for the battery pack on the microbit. Because the piece that holds the combined microbit and ringbit to the rest of model blocks off the ports. So we couldn't power the model or download the code to it without taking it apart, and then to get it to run we had to find a different way to secure the microbit and ringbit to the rest of the model. Secondly there's no provision in the build for the microbit's battery pack. The first model is a static 'traffic light' and so this didn't present a huge problem. We could just balance it behind the model. The second model however is a car, which obviously needs to be able to move, and so we had to figure out a way of incorporating the battery pack. These are unnecessary annoyances, but the worst of it, and the reason I wouldn't recommend the kit to anyone, is that the microbit batteries didn't seem capable of powering the car sufficiently to make it function. Whilst the microbit was plugged into our computer by USB, in order to download the code, the car worked fine (allowing that we had to hold it rather than let it run so that it didn't yank the cable out). Without USB power all it could manage was for one wheel to turn almost imperceptibly slowly. In other words, as a way to get the microbit to power a moving Lego model, this kit is a total failure.
I wrote to Elecfreaks to explain these issues and ask for assistance, and have as yet heard nothing back. Very disappointing!”
