MiOYOOW Line Following Robot Car Kit, Beginners Smart Car Soldering Practice Kit STEM Educational Electronics Soldering Projects for School and Home Learning - TT Motor

This kit was fun to build and a lot of fun to watch it follow a line with blinking red LEDs (red lens) on top. When it runs, two red LEDs (clear lens) illuminates the line it follows. The two LEDs on top are used with the trimmer potentiometers for tuning when the left/right motors turn on so it can follow the track (line). I took a bold felt pen and drew an oval around a single piece of printer paper. I did not expect it to follow turns that sharp, but it worked. Line width may have been about 1/2 inch. You will need to have a soldering iron and solder and a way to remove a small amount of insulation. I used the battery pack to compare the two leads on the motors and connected the motors the right way on the first try. If the motor goes the wrong way, just reverse the wires. My kit had 'five-band resistors. Resistor value color codes can be found on the internet. The manual was great about warning IC’s are polarity sensitive. The board was well marked for other polarity-sensitive parts. This was pretty fun. It makes me wonder if someday model train track will be printed at home.

I found no manual or QR code in any of the product images. They have some tips in the description but this is a non-trivial project. Had looked at purchasing for a camp with 20 kids with 90min slot to build. It took me over an hour to build as an expert (taking some photos) so it would be over 2 hrs with a assistant and a novice, Still a very cool project if you have time and an assistant to help. Biggest problem I saw was the complete lack of clarity on polarity of motor. I had to tin leads and touch to board to find correct writing to cause vehicle to move forward. Hint is the top lead (when motor mounted goes to the forward pad on the board for both left & right motors. Also because they do not want to spend another 2 cents on foam. Both the chip & socket have their leads mangled in shipping and must be carefully straightened before assembly.

Not a great product ...does not work as intended even with modifications.

When it arrived I showed it to my son who is middle school, he went thru the one page document provided. There is a QR code which will take you to a detailed step by step guide included in the document. After going over he wanted to start building it seems pretty simple to build. I have a good temperature controlled soldering iron, but all you need is a regular one which will work fine for this project. Since it was his first time soldering I had to do half the board showing him how to, and he did the rest. I would advice 100% adult guidance and oversight if your kids are as young as mine. The PCB is well marked and transistors, resistors and motors etc are positioned in such a way that you wont have to guess, which is very good for people without electronics background. It will take around 3 to 4 hours to build for a kid. Overall the kit is very simple and fun to build. For the price of the product its certainly worth it. I will add pictures and update how it goes after few days.

TL;DR; Use good batteries Assembly problems: The instructions are really lacking. It's so strange that they completely omit the motor connection step. The polarity of the motor pads on the PCB is not marked. I've soldered the motors exactly like in the picture in PDF and they were both backwards. If I remember correctly, you need to solder the motor connector which is closest to PCB to the pad which is closer to the back of the car. Soldering photo-diodes and white LEDs was tricky without another hand. After my son and me finished soldering and assembling, I quickly tuned the car using potentiometers and it ran perfectly the first time. But it only ran once! I wanted to calibrate it a bit more and one side stopped responding (the motor was always running). I could never get it back to working state. Next day I've spent several hour with multimeter. I managed to make both sides of the car to react to bright light, but it did not work with it's own lights. With bright light, the inputs were ~400mV and the LM393 chip compared them correctly, outputting ~2V from one of the outputs. With car's own lights (+white paper) however the inputs were ~1.4V and both outputs were always <0.1V regardless of which input was higher, so both wheels were always spinning. The potentiometers were not helping much - AFAIR, they changed the inputs in the 1.3V-1.5V range. I've started reading about the problems with the LM393 chip and found one forum page that said that the inputs need to be ~1.2V lower than the chip VCC for the chip to work. This was definitely not true for me, since the chip was only getting 2.0-2.4V which is closer to the input values. I've replaced the batteries (strange - the ones I've used were pretty new) and the car started working again! So, 5 stars for my education. 1-2 stars for instructions. Feature requests: * Definitely fix the instructions regarding the motor soldering and installation. * Repurpose potentiometers, so that one of them sets the base level and the second one sets balance. It will make calibration easier. The "base" potentiometer should probably have bigger range, so that it can cover more situations.

Great price and very engaging. you have to be into robotics to be able to figure out how to put it together thoough. and even then you need to follow along online with the video, would love if they would have included better guide on how to build it.

My son found it a fun project. He played with ways to control the bot. In the end he found black electronic tape was te way to go as it could be pulled up and moved around.

This is exactly what we wanted. The cost was good and it was the type of project perfect for our kids. They had fun and learned too. If you are looking for a little car robot to put together for your older kids this is a good option. We did set up the track differently because the lights didn't seem strong enough, but that got them thinking of problem-solving, which was part of the fun for them.