FIELD TESTVERDICT
A fiddly kit with
some niggles,
but fun to
play with and
offers some
scope for future
development.7 / 10
Aside from an electrical problem (see below),
the ease of getting the electronics working
came as a welcome relief to the fiddliness of the
mechanical parts.
NOT PLAIN SAILING
The main problem with the electronics is that the
board sits just above the motors, and the battery
connection has a habit of shorting out on the metal
casing of the motor. This produces a strange,
intermittent error when pushing the battery in –
which, as there’s no on/off switch or on-board
charging, you have to do quite often. We skirted this
issue by jamming a bit of plastic under the board, but
this is a less than ideal situation.
We spoke with Totem about this and the issue with
some nuts not being fully threaded. They are aware of
the problems and are looking at potential solutions. If
they can fix these, we’ll revise our review.
There are some expansion options, if you’re willing
to spend the time getting to grips with the system of
joints and brackets, but there are enough non-
standard parts to make this tricky. For example, it’s
easy to see how the servo could be used to drive
different types of weapons, but the servo mounting
isn’t easy to reposition.
The electronics, however, are easier to reuse. You
can drive up to four motors and two servos, and the
app allows you to build an interface of buttons for
this in different ways. Using this, you can build an
intuitive interface for almost any arrangements of
these actuators.
You get a lot for your money with the Mini Trooper
kit. At the end of it, you’ve got two fighting robots
that you can have fun driving around and battling.
However, there are enough niggles in the creation to
mean that we can’t recommend these to beginners.Left
The Bluetooth-
controlled board
at the heart of this
robot can be reused
in other robots
Below
The nut and bolt
construction is solid,
but can be hard to
get into place