PiCrawler

Important: Do not forget to buy Raspberry Pi, two 18650 batteries and a 18650 battery charger.First impressions and assembly:Very positive: The set is very nice and feels very premium. The white-painted metallic parts are beautiful. No blemishes.The assembly instruction is printed in color on high-quality paper.The drawings are great. The instructions also serve as a calibration stage.It's probably the best instruction for an inexpensive robot I've seen.The set includes everything including 2 screwdrivers, a nut key, cables, etc.There are spares for each screw type. I think there is a spare flex camera cable and a spare ultrasound connector cable.Small issue: One of the metal parts was bent a little bit. I straightened it with a tool.Small negative: I did not quite like the black nylon standoffs for the Raspberry Pi - When I tried to screw them into the holes they resisted and one of them broke. Fortunately there was a spare. Brass standoffs would probably be better. But maybe there is was some reason to choose nylon.Slight negative: Attaching servo to the outer part of the leg is hard. There is not enough space. The middle servo is OK because there is ~1mm more spacing/width. Also, the included screwdrivers do not fit through the holes in the middle part of the leg.Small proposal: The top part of the leg is currently "rounded" by making 2 cuts in a seemingly arbitrary way. It would be better instead to make 3 cuts ate regular angles: 22.5, 45, 67.5. This would looks a little bit nicer and would make setting up the legs at 45 degrees easier.Two of the servos made different sound compared to other 10 (when you rotate them by manually). However I did not notice any difference in performance.Negative: The Robot hat cannot charge the battery, so you need to buy a battery charger and keep it around. Some of robots have built-in USB Type-C battery charging support.Software:Positive: Ezblock Studio looks pretty solid.There are some good preloaded samples that cover all important aspects of controlling the robot.There is a pre-built sample that allows you to control the robo using a virtual gamepad.Positive: A very important aspect of this robot kit is that it allows programming the robot using the Python programming language. This opens limitless possibilities for designing the robot behavior and computer vision systems.Experimentation:Positive: The robot can walk on carpet (while my other robot dog couldn't). It's not very fast, but this is understandable given the leg movement range and the need to move the legs in sequence.Other thoughts:I wish SunFounder also had a robot with 6 legs instead of 4 (hexapod vs quadruped). 6 legs allows more ways to experiment with movement and different gaits.Overall:A nice quadruped robot kit.

I got this cause I wanted a robot kit as I need to learn python for a larger robotics project. I really only learn hands on so I need a tool to see tangible results. I didn't get the one with EZBlock so I cannot speak to how well that works.There is a lot of good stuff in this kit for the cost, especially comparatively to other kits. You also don't see too many kits with legs outside of the bumbling two leggers for a good price.The instructions are fine, but you need to work with both a browser open and the assembly leaflet. I feel the leaflet could have a bit more information on it and some "Do this like this OR ELSE" notes as I had a couple times I had to do partial disassembling to adjust leg positions. Also the plastic rivets, its good they come with extra as a couple exploded. I feel like there's a nyloc nut screw combo that could do better.There are also a few repeating difficult screw locations that a better/different/wider cutout could ease some of the pain, ESPECIALLY if you have to do any corrections.Overall though, the build, imaging, and calibration was easy enough once I found what I did wrong. A good note is that calibration can only correct servo>leg position so far, so the position you attach the legs to the body at is real important.The online instructions for getting going, and the explanation of the code and how they did each bit are great. Not a ton of results online for troubleshooting though. I was able to get through it from my IT and 3d printer building experience but I think it could benefit in the long run to have more than "Maybe zero the motors?" cause mine were perfectly zeroed and I still had calibration issues.Also, on the Python script leg calibration, the legs move when you change the numbers, but not all the time. A great many of the inputs are missed, so you kind of have to measure, change it a couple steps, and then save and run the calibrator again so they position properly.Overall though, not enough to take it from a 5 to a 4 star imo.

It's a great kit, our issues mostly come from using Raspberry Pi 2B instead of the newer boards.It needs a bluetooth connection which we had to remedy by getting a dongle instead.Once it's installed, it works wonderfully.Good learning process while building this robot with my kid.The company was supporting us as well while we were having problems with it.We are still exploring more things about this robot, I think it's pretty amazing but its tough for beginners, especially if you get stuck on some aspect during the assembly.We got stuck at trying to get the servos reset to the origin position, had to flush the OS and run the python codes instead. Which fortunately was provided by the company as well.It's a pretty awesome robot kit.