servo
Goes to an angle, 0 to 180 degrees. Its horn really turns, with its torque and its dead band.
Build your robot part by part
A mecano is the robot you build yourself, in 3D and with real physics: let go of it and it falls over. Then you connect your block program and watch it walk.
See the three finished robotsFrom nothing to a robot that walks
- 1
Open the Gallery and create a mecano
Mecanos tab, + button, and you are inside the builder. An empty world with its floor, waiting.
- 2
Add parts and pick their pin
The Components chip opens the same palette you know from the blocks, with the same Outputs and Inputs. Adding a part brings up the very same dialog: a name and a pin.
- 3
Put it together
Move, rotate and scale each part, draw the supports that act as the chassis, and weld together whatever has to stay together. It saves itself after every drag.
- 4
Hit play
Physics kicks in and you drive the parts with your finger. When you like it, open your block app and connect it.
Eight parts
The same families as in the blocks, with the same colours: Outputs take orders from your program, Inputs send it data.
Outputs
motor
Gearmotor with a wheel. Here you send speed and direction, not position.
led
Lights up. The lens really glows, and every led has its own.
neopixel
Like the led, but the order is a whole RGB colour.
Inputs
potentiometer
A knob you turn with your finger. One of the two parts you touch while your program runs.
button
A push button that sinks when you press it. The other part you touch with your finger.
line sensor
Looks down and tells you whether there is painted track below or clean floor.
ultrasonic
Measures the distance to whatever is in front, just like the one on your board.
And three things that are not parts
Supports
The chassis. You draw the plate on a 6 × 6 grid, pick its colour, and out of that drawing come its size, its weight and its collisions. It is the meccano plate of a lifetime: a rectangle with one hole per cell.
Track
A black line 2 cm wide, the width of electrical tape, that you paint on the floor with your finger. It has no weight and hits nothing: it is paint, and it is what the line sensor reads.
Welds
Two taps and two parts are joined for good. It is what keeps the robot in one piece when the physics shakes it about.
How you handle it
One finger always orbits the camera. Two fingers do whatever tool you have armed: move, rotate, scale or weld. At the bottom, a dock of five chips: Play, Share, New support, Track and Components.
One world unit is one centimetre. When the Otto below moves 3.4 cm per cycle, it really moves 3.4 cm.
The pin is the contract
Nothing to pair by hand, no menus, no assigning parts to blocks. If you declared your servo on pin 9 in the program and you built your servo on pin 9 in the mecano, they find each other on their own. It is the same number you would write on your real board.
Open your app and tap Connect
Below the simulators you get My builds, with yours and their part count. Tap the one you want.
The «How it got connected» report shows up
Four plain lists: what got connected, what your program asks for and is not in the build, the pins two parts share, and the parts your program does not use.
The robot mounts below, already running
In the strip at the bottom of the editor, read-only so you cannot break it by accident. The only things your finger touches are the potentiometer and the button, which in the real world also depend on you.
And when you move it to your Arduino or ESP32 you do not change a single block: the pins are the same.
Three finished robots to download
Grab the app and the mecano for each one, open them in Nairda and hit play. They are the very same files the app saves inside.
Otto, the biped
Four servos: two hips and two ankles. The dashboard has a joystick and a cadence slider, and the program is split into seven functions: start, forward, back, right, left and stop.
Parts and pins
🔄cadera_izqD2
🔄cadera_derD3
🔄tobillo_izqD4
🔄tobillo_derD5
Line follower
Two line sensors and two motors. The black track is painted with your finger on the mecano's floor: it is exactly what the sensors keep reading.
Parts and pins
🛤️line_sensor1D8
🛤️line_sensor2D9
⚙️motor1D2 · D3 · D4
⚙️motor2D5 · D6 · D7
Obstacle dodger
Two motors and an ultrasonic sensor. The dashboard plots the distance the sensor is measuring, live.
Parts and pins
⚙️motor1D2 · D3 · D4
⚙️motor2D5 · D6 · D7
📏ultrasonic1echo D8 · trigger D9
How to open them on your device
Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows and Mac
Download the file and tap it (or double-click it). Open with Nairda shows up and it imports on its own.
In the browser
There is no «open with» here. Download the file, go to the Gallery and use the import button in the top bar.
The extension does not matter: Nairda looks at the contents of the file, so it knows on its own whether it is an app or a mecano, and the Gallery jumps to the right tab. Importing always creates a new one: it never overwrites what you already had.
Where it runs
The builder runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows and in the browser. Not on Linux.
And the old simulator?
Still there, down to a single card: Component simulation, the 3D mosaic of every part you declare, for testing a lone led or servo without building anything. The virtual car and robot arm were retired: the mecano does their job better, and with an advantage they never had. There the pins are yours, not magic numbers you had to guess.
Build one yourself
The builder lives inside the Nairda app, in the Mecanos tab of the Gallery.
Get Nairda Or open it in your browser →