Amicus Prime Users

[Trevize84]

Sorry for resurrecting this but people who ends up here has to know. Amicus Prime is a whole pile of rubbish. Let me explain why and consider I'm an embedded software engineer, so I may have a say on software and technology design.

I made 2 androids apps in my life as a self-taught programmer and they weren't as bad as this one. And trust me the apps I made were bad. The Amicus app is bad in many ways, it follows no Android apps design guidelines, it's dodgy and functionalities aren't... functional!

The tablet... it's cheap, old and useless. Why on the Earth shouldn't I use my phone to do the same? Indeed I use my phone. But geez... I could save the money for the tablet, the connection cable (why do you sell a wire if the robot uses Bluetooth?) and the tablet standee.

The robot. I understand mechanical and controlling challenges here. This wasn't an easy job. However, all exercises are random. Take exercise 83. 2 tops on the far right hand side and 2 tops on the left hand side. Every second ball has random trajectory because deflector moves while the ball is still on the ramp!

Bad design by shortsighted people with no experience in computer science, please change CTO.

Litter.

 

[plunder]

Take exercise 83. 2 tops on the far right hand side and 2 tops on the left hand side. Every second ball has random trajectory because deflector moves while the ball is still on the ramp!

Are you an owner, and also new to the acquisition? Didn't you check either app before, offline? I did. I knew the Amicus from my club, but decided for the Omega for home use. App functionality played a decisive role.
On the Omega app the equivalent to Butterfly exercise 83 would be exercise 6?
I do this exercise and at the preset of 40bpm my bot performs as it should, no random trajectories in between. So all good here, i.e. i cannot confirm your observations (as a Prime user).

How many hours of ball shooting has the robot done by now (in total since new installation)? -- Let's help it,

 

[Trevize84]

Are you an owner, and also new to the acquisition? Didn't you check either app before, offline? I did. I knew the Amicus from my club, but decided for the Omega for home use. App functionality played a decisive role.
On the Omega app the equivalent to Butterfly exercise 83 would be exercise 6?
I do this exercise and at the preset of 40bpm my bot performs as it should, no random trajectories in between. So all good here, i.e. i cannot confirm your observations (as a Prime user).

How many hours of ball shooting has the robot done by now (in total since new installation)? -- Let's help it, or was your intention to just troll\rant and leave some stinky 💩

Yes I'm the owner. Robot is brand new, with few hours of use. Exercise 83 was set up at 15 BPM. Yes I checked the app, I knew it was poor. I can just do reverse engineering of their protocol and make my own app in few days of work. What I cannot make is mechanics with high accuracy, that's why I went for the Amicus. I then realized mechanic isn't accurate.

Tested with Yasaka 1-Star and xiom 3-star balls. Robot seems a little more accurate with Axiom balls, but still inadequate.

I couldn't find how to get the omega shipped to my place without crazy fees.

 

[plunder]

Robot is brand new, with few hours of use. Exercise 83 was set up at 15 BPM. (...) I then realized mechanic isn't accurate.

Thanks for ignoring my in*ult hehe. So first of all, you could consider whether returning the Amicus is an option for you, if you had preferred an Omega (btw shipping of the Omega is free within the EU, and it's indeed stocked in the EU not UK).

Second, my Omega bot came supplied with original balls and i mixed in used Joola Training 40+ (= the cheapest branded ball ever!!); both balls work great with the bot. I am not sure if your Amicus was shipped with accompanying balls (plz enlighten us!); it should. The robot shines up (~polishes) all balls well and fast, and my 20y/o andro balls (overused and out-of-spec) indeed doht work well with the bot. At this point our focus of attention should not be on the balls, if they were supplied/original and or new. I've been hard-core testing myself, if "aged" (= "polished") original balls could become an issue and then needed to be switched out from the feed. (hard-core testing = having the same few balls, like 30, in the feed, not 100, not 150). By now, my 2 balls have "aged" well thru the bot but performance has been stable. It's the 3 wheels which do the polishing of the balls.

Third, already now, please check carefully whether the deflector (= the metal part in the so-called Deflector Assembly) has accumulated deposits of buildup at the sides and at the top, i.e. at the 3 contacting points of the ball in the deflector. This buildup is actually hard plastic, originating from the balls. It is quite hard to get off from the smooth surfaces (left, right, top), and the Omega manual is very clear/detailed about how to scrape it off safely, without harming the Deflector Assembly. In short, if the ball production/placement is erratic by now, then it is due to the buildup (left, right, top). The Omega manufacturer is stocking the retrofit kit (which i already installed hehe), and with it all those issues are solved at once, as i can personally confirm. The point being, the "mechanic isn't accurate" (let's call it 'performance drop' of the mechanics) can be observed already after 45mins in, even on brand-new robots. Why? Simply because the buildup is happening so fast, especially with new grippy balls (which haven't been "aged" yet by the robot).
But, as mentioned, once you have the retrofit kit installed (hopefully soon in future), there will be absolutely zero buildup, with new or old balls, in the Deflector Assembly and hence also no more performance drop.
Advice: doht bother scraping off the buildup, if you plan on returning the Amicus to your vendor. Doht put up with the Prime android app, if you doht like it. At the 1700€ price point you should be as fully satisfied as i am.

Fourth, since there are no more such issues after modding the (new or old) Amipong, you'll be hard pressed to find another robot on the market which produces universal balls really(?) more consistently. I've examined yt footage of pongbots for example and can see variation in ball placement too.

 

[dingyibvs]

Sorry for resurrecting this but people who ends up here has to know. Amicus Prime is a whole pile of rubbish. Let me explain why and consider I'm an embedded software engineer, so I may have a say on software and technology design.

I made 2 androids apps in my life as a self-taught programmer and they weren't as bad as this one. And trust me the apps I made were bad. The Amicus app is bad in many ways, it follows no Android apps design guidelines, it's dodgy and functionalities aren't... functional!

The tablet... it's cheap, old and useless. Why on the Earth shouldn't I use my phone to do the same? Indeed I use my phone. But geez... I could save the money for the tablet, the connection cable (why do you sell a wire if the robot uses Bluetooth?) and the tablet standee.

The robot. I understand mechanical and controlling challenges here. This wasn't an easy job. However, all exercises are random. Take exercise 83. 2 tops on the far right hand side and 2 tops on the left hand side. Every second ball has random trajectory because deflector moves while the ball is still on the ramp!

Bad design by shortsighted people with no experience in computer science, please change CTO.

Litter.

LOL, wait until you try to make a custom drill and the name won't save. That's been the case for years with no fix for such a basic function! Also, let me know how the random placement function works. I think mine used to work but it doesn't anymore, wonder how that can be fixed....

If you manage to make a custom app send the apk my way, it's a really terrible piece of software. If one is OK with its mechanicals the Powerpong def seems like the better option, too bad it's not easily available to you.

I agree with @plunder that consistency-wise the high level robots are all fairly similar. I have both the Amicus Prime and the Pongbot and they have similar ball serving consistencies. With that said, you don't have to retrofit the Pongbot with anything to make it work, and it can generate far more realistic balls.

OTOH, the pongbot's software while it's much more reliable than the Amicus' lacks several very useful functions. They've improved it some but after my experience with the Amicus I certainly won't be assuming that they'll continue to do so.

 

[ycjason]

I had a Amicus Prime since 2019 (maybe it's 2018), used it regularly in the beginning, not so much in the past 2 years though. My experiences are mixed:

* I love the general functionality and design of the robot.
* The software isn't great as it is buggy. However, there are workarounds for the bug as you get used to them, and the support team actually do respond when I contacted them back in 2019.

 

[plunder]

I didn't mean starting from wide backhand/ wide forehand side and then serving. I meant a serve aimed at the opponent's wide forehand/backhand. With the "Amipong" if you program balls to aim wide with sidespin, the trajectory and spin is not realistic. Maybe your DIY tape job solves the problem, but i'm not sure how it would when the ball has to be deflected off the deflector plate to be aimed that way. As @dingyibvs suggested, i suppose you could position the Amni pong's head so that its aimed at a wide forehand/backhand, but that wouldn't be the best practice for a multiball drill.

2115 okay, omega exercise "28. Left Sidespin Serve to BH", simulating a tomahawk serve aimed at my BH, i.e. upon straight racket ("brick wall") contact the ball would bounce off to the left-hand side. Detailed Observation (DetO): no matter how i change the ball settings incl. ball placement (e.g. immediately at the left ray borderline), the ball may 1stbounce a bit left from the centerline (i.e. far away from the left ray borderline) then sidekicks/curves'n 2ndbounces right from the centerline, which would be per definitionem my FH side. The ball does carry side-spin, imho rather clean side-spin by the time it hits my racket. In effect, to me, it's a rather harmless side-spin serve because it is not fast/not long and the amount of side-spin is not extreme.

Basically, the exercise should be renamed to "28. Left Sidespin Serve to Middle" or simply "28. short Tomahawk to Middle", and then nobody could complain!

So i am confirming that in the Omega standard setup (i.e. location=middle, height=H2, orientation=straight) it is NOT possible to produce a Serve with Left Sidespin which 2ndbounces anywhere near the left corner of my table side. Amipong shoppers should know this beforehand and not be surprised, bad news.

Good news. There is an imho acceptable workaround/solution, though: simply rotate the so-called Throwing Head Assembly (THA), such that orientation=rotated. Now exercise 28 will direct Tomahawk serves to your actual BH side, near the left corner of the table, short or long, depending on the ball settings. Okay you may not(?) be impressed by the quality of the Omega's Tomahawk serve (like speed, amount of side-spin) — at least you get to practice its serve receive anyway. Ofc with orientation=rotated, one pays the price by losing the facility to build a multiball drill.

Btw when i practice serve receive, e.g. a particular serve like exercise 28, then i focus on exactly that, the serve receive, my variations and perfections of it, and doht want a multiball drill. And if i want a multiball drill starting with a Serve, then i go back to orientation=straight and simply accept that there woht be any Tomahawks wide to my BH.

And the deflector plate? In this post (or exercise 28), the deflector has no saying, no influence, doesn't help it. It's fully veered to the Left, so the ball should 1stbounce to the left (which it hardly does in exercise 28), but due to the "unrealistic side-spin" the ball ends up to the player's FH side (or the Middle), as described before. Yes, agreed, that's a shortcoming of the simplistic mechanics, compared with the complex head movement of a pongbot. But either mechanism has advantages and disadvantages, in the long run. I focus on the advantages which the simplistic mechanics of Amipong provides, and accept the disadvantages. 2246

 

[Jslick89]

2115 okay, omega exercise "28. Left Sidespin Serve to BH", simulating a tomahawk serve aimed at my BH, i.e. upon straight racket ("brick wall") contact the ball would bounce off to the left-hand side. Detailed Observation (DetO): no matter how i change the ball settings incl. ball placement (e.g. immediately at the left ray borderline), the ball may 1stbounce a bit left from the centerline (i.e. far away from the left ray borderline) then sidekicks/curves'n 2ndbounces right from the centerline, which would be per definitionem my FH side. The ball does carry side-spin, imho rather clean side-spin by the time it hits my racket. In effect, to me, it's a rather harmless side-spin serve because it is not fast/long and the amount of side-spin is not extreme.

Basically, the exercise should be renamed to "28. Left Sidespin Serve to Middle" or simply "28. short Tomahawk to Middle", and then nobody could complain!

So i am confirming that in the Omega standard setup (i.e. location=middle, height=H2, orientation=straight) it is NOT possible to produce a Serve with Left Sidespin which 2ndbounces anywhere near the left corner of my table side. Amipong users should know this beforehand and not be surprised.

There is an imho acceptable workaround/solution, though: simply rotate the so-called Throwing Head Assembly (THA), such that orientation=rotated. Now exercise 28 will direct Tomahawk serves to your actual BH side, near the left corner of the table, short or long, depending on the ball settings. You may not(?) be impressed by the quality of the Omega's Tomahawk serve (like speed, amount of side-spin) — but you get to practice its serve receive anyway. Ofc with orientation=rotated, one pays the price by losing the facility to build a multiball drill.

Btw when i practice serve receive, e.g. a particular serve like exercise 28, then i focus on exactly that, the serve receive, my variations and perfections of it, and doht want a multiball drill. And if i want a multiball drill starting with a Serve, then i go back to orientation=straight and simply accept that there woht be any Tomahawks wide to my BH. 2223

I appreciate the honest feedback. This was exactly my experience with the PowerPong 500. I didn't think of the work around of rotating the actual throwing head when I was still using that robot. I just excluded that type of practice from my robot training. It wasn't a huge deal, but it was something I was longing for from a robot, especially since I was able to easily practice those types of serves on my NEWGY 2055!! So when I heard about the PongBot Omni S, and I saw the significantly lower price tag, for me it was a no brainer to go for the PongBot.

I hope you would also agree that being able to set up a multi-ball drill that consists of something like this:

pendulum serve to your wide backhand
short underspin to forehand
top spin to deep middle
topspin to deep backhand (hit with your backhand, or pivot with your forehand)

is an insanely valuable drill to practice. you can switch out the first ball to "tomohawk serve to wide forehand" and the second ball to short underspin to backhand. At USATT 1700, this is a typical pattern in most of my match points. I couldn't do it with the PowerPong 500. If i wanted the first ball to go wide short and wide to my forehand or backhand, it had to be a pure backspin ball. It was still good practice, but it wasn't the best that it could be.

 

[plunder]

What it caht do is "tomohawk serve to wide backhand". But i hear ya, the Omni does both better, more human-like realistic. That point goes to omni then.
Anyway, for now i appreciate the simplicity and robustness of the amipong hardware and the other advantages which come with that. For sure I would be interested in testdriving the Omni at some point, in direct comparison. Until then i'm trying to get the most out of the amipong, as does Pechpong Seth Pech 💪

 

[rova]

Sorry for resurrecting this but people who ends up here has to know. Amicus Prime is a whole pile of rubbish. Let me explain why and consider I'm an embedded software engineer, so I may have a say on software and technology design.

I made 2 androids apps in my life as a self-taught programmer and they weren't as bad as this one. And trust me the apps I made were bad. The Amicus app is bad in many ways, it follows no Android apps design guidelines, it's dodgy and functionalities aren't... functional!

The tablet... it's cheap, old and useless. Why on the Earth shouldn't I use my phone to do the same? Indeed I use my phone. But geez... I could save the money for the tablet, the connection cable (why do you sell a wire if the robot uses Bluetooth?) and the tablet standee.

The robot. I understand mechanical and controlling challenges here. This wasn't an easy job. However, all exercises are random. Take exercise 83. 2 tops on the far right hand side and 2 tops on the left hand side. Every second ball has random trajectory because deflector moves while the ball is still on the ramp!

Bad design by shortsighted people with no experience in computer science, please change CTO.

Litter.

Totally agree! For your information Butterfly support sent me this note after they failed to recognize the ball feeding problem:

Luckily I was able to fix it myself with a duct tape hack. Thanks for the "goodwill" Butterfly ;-)

 

[plunder]

some questions/comments from my part:
1) you had sent in the full robot to your dealer for him to maintain it for you AND he actually did so for FREE? — if so, that wouldn't have been necessary . the full device is perfectly maintainable by a grown man, and there are plenty of detailed maintenance instructions in the Omega manual (and also some in the Prime manual). It's one of the superior aspects which i like and appreciate about the product compared with competitive robots: the robot's simple construction can be serviced to live a lifetime, even the electronics (printed circuit board PCB, e.g. if damaged thru corrosion)!
2) the only reason/complaint why you had done so was the self-blocking of balls at the black plastic tray? — imho it's totally acceptable to live with cheap hacks like the duct tape mod or the mini ramp build. If i were a customer servicer, i'd even suggest such workarounds to the private end consumer.
3) have you been a long-time user of the robot living in the Far East of B? — just curious, i sometimes play there, love the gauffres pommes gentils.
4) you're leaving us with the impression that you're disgruntled (about ??) and or doht enjoy your Amicus, is that absolutely the case? — let us know if you do like the robot or not thx.

 

[rova]

some questions/comments from my part:
1) you had sent in the full robot to your dealer for him to maintain it for you AND he actually did so for FREE? — if so, that wouldn't have been necessary . the full device is perfectly maintainable by a grown man, and there are plenty of detailed maintenance instructions in the Omega manual (and also some in the Prime manual). It's one of the superior aspects which i like and appreciate about the product compared with competitive robots: the robot's simple construction can be serviced to live a lifetime!
2) the only reason/complaint why you had done so was the self-blocking of balls at the black plastic tray? — imho it's totally acceptable to live with cheap hacks like the duct tape mod or the mini ramp build. If i were a customer servicer, i'd even suggest such workarounds to the private end consumer.
3) have you been a long-time user of the robot living in the Far East of Belgium? — just curious, i sometimes play there, love the gauffres pommes gentils.
4) you're leaving us with the impression that you're disgruntled (about ??) and or doht enjoy your Amicus, is that absolutely the case? — let us know if you do like the robot or not thx.

Fair questions!
1) Maintenance is indeed easy, I opened it myself for a full clean after the warranty expired. I also repositioned the wheels once.
2) every 1-10 balls, it stopped shooting a new one. So I had to stir the balls by hand. This is a design issue imo and yes if they recommended a duct tape hack, I would have not been so disappointed in their support. Still I had to find out myself.
3) Yes been using it for 2 years befor I found the duct tape hack myself. I live in the far West of BE . Never tried the gauffres pommes myself, will check that out asap.
4) For 2 years I was very frustrated with it because I was never able to fully use the robot (multi ball drills were just impossible). Since the duct tape hack I have been really enjoying it and now after 3 years, not a single component has failed me (besides the cheap tablet with horrible touch). So credit to that! Still a bit too expensive imo, 1000-1200$ price range seems more reasonable.

 

[Trevize84]

Manuale of Amicus Prime is pretty bad actually. Is there any PDF version of the Omega available online?

 

[Trevize84]

BTW Amicus comes without balls...

 

[Tinykin]

What exactly is the 'duct tape hack?'

 

[plunder]

Manuale of Amicus Prime is pretty bad actually. Is there any PDF version of the Omega available online?

my robopon dropbox is an online site , i do recommend the 74pages Omega pdf by Greg:

https://bit.ly/robopon

 

[N88GUM]

tomohawk serve to wide forehand (harmless ball quality though)
short underspin to backhand
top spin to deep middle
topspin to deep backhand (hit with your backhand, or pivot with your forehand)

Both, the powerpong could do, in the standard setup. What it caht do is "tomohawk serve to wide backhand". But i hear ya, the Omni does both better, more human-like realistic. That point goes to omni then.
Anyway, for now i appreciate the simplicity and robustness of the amipong hardware and the other advantages which come with that. For sure I would be interested in testdriving the Omni at some point, in direct comparison. Until then i'm trying to get the most out of the amipong, as does Pechpong Seth Pech 💪

If anyone could share this drill either in power pong format or Amicus file format, it would be appreciated. Please pm me or I'll pm to get the files sent over.