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Pros
- Remote controllable and programmable.
- Looks and sounds faithful to the films.
- Teaches the basics of programming.
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Cons
- Choppy movement controls.
- To get the most out of it, you need a phone or tablet.
Star Wars remains a cultural and marketing behemoth, and R2-D2 remains the world's most beloved trash-can-shaped droid. Last year we looked at Sphero's BB-8 robot, while this year brings us a more elegant toy from a more civilized age. The $99 Smart R2-D2 from Hasbro is a scaled-down version of the blue-and-white hero that you can directly control or program using your smartphone or tablet. It's fun, clever, and educational, with more tricks up its sleeve than BB-8.
Design
R2-D2 stands 9.5 inches tall and 6.4 inches wide. It's made completely out of plastic, with a mostly white body and a combination of blue and silver highlights on its dome, legs, and various molded ports and doors (none of which open). There are a few other splashes of color, like green and black circles on the dome and copper-colored molded plastic cables built into the feet. It looks very nice for a toy, but it won't be mistaken for a scaled prop or other enthusiast-oriented collectible.
A door on the back hides the battery compartment, which holds four AA batteries. Hasbro hasn't specified how long the batteries last, but you should be able to get several hours of playtime, based on our testing.
The droid has a few clever functions without the app, like an alarm mode that causes it to make a siren sound if it detects motion (the sound is fairly quiet, and not particularly useful as a room alarm). To really get the most out of R2, however, you need the free Smart R2-D2 app for Android and iOS. It makes R2-D2's most interesting features, like remote control and programming, available.
App Control
The Smart R2-D2 app has three main modes: Drive, Missions, and Programming. Drive is a direct remote control mode that lets you pilot R2-D2 using a simple control panel on your smartphone or tablet. You can make it move forward or backward, turn right or left, spin its dome right, or make a variety of sounds.
It's simple and responsive, but steering is a bit jerky. Both the droid and its dome only turn on 45-degree increments in preset movements, so you can't smoothly guide the robot around in any direction. You have to press the turn button and wait for it to turn, or hold it and let it turn several increments at a time before you let go. Similarly, moving forward and backward only occurs in preset steps you can multiply by holding the button down. It's a choppy control scheme.
Programming
Missions is a set of prompts that walks you through the programming elements. It introduces you to the programming interface and arranging the different commands to do what you want. It's a very helpful mode that can help show you some useful techniques you might not immediately figure out, like linking multiple commands to work simultaneously, and repeating commands with one tile by tapping the number on the corner.
The missions are necessary to unlock most of R2-D2's programming blocks. Fortunately, they're all extremely easy, with drop-down hints that explicitly show you how to do everything. More importantly, because the app doesn't have particularly detailed explanations for what each block means, the missions can teach you what they do at a fast pace.
Programming lets you put the skills you learned in the Missions to use and direct R2-D2 to do almost anything you want. The droid is controlled with tile-based commands arranged in a list. When you press the Run button on the app, it executes the commands in order from top to bottom on the list. Multiple tiles can be arranged on each row, making R2-D2 perform multiple commands at once. For example, you can connect the Forward, Flash, and Surprise tiles horizontally to make the droid move forward, flash its light, and whistle as if surprised at the same time, before moving on to the next step.
Orange conditional tiles add to the complexity, letting you build loops of behaviors and program R2-D2 to only perform a command if it receives an input. The droid can respond to clapping, speech, and music, and a sensor on the front will detect if a hand waves in front of it or if there's an obstacle in the way. A knob on its dome can also be pushed like a button or twisted to trigger commands. It's a very simple programming language, but it can introduce kids to basic concepts like loops and conditionals.
Fun With Droids
Both directly controlling and programming R2-D2 is fun and engaging. Simply driving it around your room while it whistles and flashes is amusing, and will please most Star Wars fans. As a programmable robot, you can make it behave any way you want, reacting to your voice or hand. The programming amounts to fairly basic macros, but you can still make it spin around, avoid walls, and squeal and back away from loud noises.
The Smart R2-D2 is an entertaining, surprisingly feature-filled Star Wars toy that works well as both a remote control vehicle and a programmable robot. If you want to get deeper into programming and explore more complex concepts, you'll need to leave the Star Wars appeal behind. The Ozobot Evo is an excellent starting toy for learning how to code, and while it's much more expensive, the Lego Mindstorms EV3 remains one of the best robotics kits we've worked with. The Littlebits Gizmos & Gadgets Kit is another good way to get into electronics, but for actual coding you'll need to pick up an Arduino Bit and dive into some much more complicated programming systems.
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