On the bench
We race red against green on a tiled bench top. Red wins more often, which has nothing to do with the colour and everything to do with which one got the fresher cells — but try telling that to anyone in the room.
Red is the skitter we hand to kids first, because it is the one they can find again under the furniture. The movement matches the green bot exactly, the cells are the same three LR44s, and two of these loose on a tiled floor is the cheapest fun on the shelf.
No remote, no remote control handset, nothing rechargeable and no lights — flip the switch and it moves. Experimenting with it means picking the surface: tile lets it turn and run almost endless laps, carpet stops it dead. Friends always ask where the controller is, and there is not one.
It sits on the nano bots shelf, in among the rest of the HEX BOTS robotic toys, so it went through the same yardstick as every other bot there before it got a card here.
Numbers our mechanic logged
Sizes, cells and surfaces below are what came off the bench; the ages are the maker’s call, not ours.
- ControlOne switch, runs itself
- Power3 LR44 cells, included
- FloorHard floors, not carpet
- Ages4 to 6 and up
- ShelfNano Bots
Who plays with it, and what stands next to it
Customers who already own the green one buy red to tell them apart, and that is when the play gets good — two bots, one floor, nobody steering. The crawling movement looks deliberate even though nothing in the design is, the fun is cool and brief, and it makes a gift that costs less than the wrapping paper on most of this shelf.
The green spider and the red scorpion run the same drive, so pick on shape and colour rather than speed. For a bot that climbs walls you want a gecko crawler, glow-in-the-dark or plain.
Getting it, swapping it
Delivery, tracking, swaps and warranty claims are handled on the order page of the store you bought from — they hold the order, we hold the bench. Read how we split that in Doorstep & swaps.
The instructions in the box run to one sheet; our charge and care guide covers cells, run life and storage between runs. Surfaces and charging questions come to bench@hexbots.pages.dev, Mon to Fri, 9am to 6pm ET.
