I hope that if you celebrate Christmas you had a good one. Santa dropped off some cool stuff at my house. I mentioned the Anki DRIVE race set before Christmas and now that we’ve had some time to play with it I can confirm it’s pretty rad.
They are basically little robot cars that race around a big track that you roll out on your floor. You control the cars via an app on your smartphone or tablet. You can adjust the speed of the car with a throttle and steer it a bit by turning your device in the air like a steering wheel. The cars are smart though and they will (for the most part) stay on the track by themselves. You don’t “steer” it as much as you move it back and forth inside the lines of the track.
This is okay though because it allows you to worry less about driving and more about using your car’s weapons. It’s sort of like a slot car track plus Wipeout. Each car has weapons you can trigger from your device. Fire your machine gun and you see the orange lights on the front of your car flash. Score a hit and the red lights on the back of the other car flash. Then you have things like tractor beams, scramblers, and other fun stuff. It feels very good to activate your tractor beam and watch the car in front of you slow down as you rush up and swerve around it.
Also you earn money with each race that you can use in the “garage” section of the app to upgrade your car. Tweak your engine, add new support abilities, buy different weapons, enhance existing ones. There are tons of options for each car. My entire family had a blast with it. We played together all four of us and had a great time. My wife spent some time racing by herself against the AI. The app comes with a little single player campaign that will have you racing against a series of computer controlled opponents. This is fun and also the only way to “unlock” some cars. Yeah, we actually bought a car that you had to beat in a race before you could use it. I thought that was pretty cool.
Overall I was really impressed with the quality and experience. The cars and tracks are very well made. The cars especially stand out as well constructed and super cool looking. We love it and so I’d highly recommend it to other families out there. Or even people without kids who just want to race and do battle with awesome tiny robot cars.
The other big thing we got was a Dremel Idea Builder 3D Printer. This one I’m not sure I can recomend yet. It’s a relatively inexpensive entry level 3D printer. Right out of the box I was printing some cool stuff. It was very easy to setup and use. I was really impressed with the first few things I made. Sadly towards the end of the night it stopped working. The extruder will no longer accept the filament line. It won’t grab on and just makes a clicking noise without actually pulling the stuff through. I tried calling Dremel support but could not get anyone. Maybe because it is the day after Christmas? I don’t know. All I know is I’ve tried all the stuff in the manual and can’t get it fixed. It’s a real bummer too because we were having so much fun with it.
I’m gonna keep working on it and I’ll try the support line again. If anyone has any tips or ideas feel free to shoot me an email. I’d love to get it sorted out and start making stuff again.
-Gabe out
