MiOYOOW 2 Pack Line Following Robot Car Kit, Beginners Smart Car Soldering Practice Kit STEM Educational Electronics Soldering Projects for School and Home Learning

This is another one of those amazing soldering projects for people learning to solder that is also great if you're trying to teach your kids how to solder. Because when you get done you don't just have something that you put together and you can turn a light on but you've actually made something that's a toy that your kid probably would have begged you to buy in the store pre-assembled. I would say the value of these is definitely worth it, the assembly isn't the easiest, but it's not supposed to be. But once you get them put together they look great and as long as you've done everything right they work great. They come with a little piece of paper that has a black loop on it that they will follow but you can take black electrical tape and put it on your floor in any pattern you want and they will just follow around the pattern. My daughter and I set up a racetrack with two strips and unfortunately hers always seems to beat mine for some reason. But it's been a great product a lot of fun to make and a lot of fun to use after

Remote control version. Download pdf instructions. 11yr old did this with guidance. Fairly straightforward. Only issue was wires to board. They go to pads not through holes so a bit mor tricky to solder. Just put a bit of solder on pad then come back and solder wire. He enjoyed running the car around with the remote.

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.

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.

I ordered this for my 7th grade daughter's robotics curriculum. I was a little hesitant because I had almost no experience soldering. But though the kit was somewhat tedious, we were able to complete it fairly quickly and without any issues. The hardest part, by far, was trying to thread the motor's wires through the PCB. In operation, the robot worked exactly as expected, though we did learn that a thinner line allowed it to move more efficiently. I'm looking forward to doing it again in a few years with my other daughter.

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.