WALABOT DIY (Android only) - Stud Finder In-Wall Imager (Only Compatible with Android smartphones)

I have been a DIY guy for more than 50 years and have tool boxes at home, vacation house, office, RV, boat, for almost everything. As a design engineer if it is a new tool I'm interested. I have some old stud finders that work OK and new ones that work great. My most recent acquisiton was the ProSensor 710 Franklin Sensors ProSensor Yellow in 2015 which is terrific! Best stud finder I have ever used! Love it. So why did I buy the Walabot? We live in Panama City Fl where a "little" category 5 hurricane Michael came ashore last October (it has just been upgraded to a Cat 5 - 3rd strongest storm in history to hit the US mainland). We are still living in an RV at the office hoping to get back into our home in a couple more months. Really needed to add a LIBERTY 129848 Hook Rail/Coat Rack with 5 Flared Tri Hooks and knew that small office shower wall had not only power lines but Pex water lines. Trying to get a good contractor to respond is like pulling teeth with a pair of tweezers. There are now THOUSANDS of them but hundreds of thousands of jobs that desperately needed to be done -so making a mistake would be just UNACCEPTABLE!! Last year my son in law had pointed out a "new gadget" that seemed cool at the time - but I did not need it.Now my Franklin sensor was in NOLA where we continue to use it to hang pictures. And now I needed not to not only just find studs but to be DARNED SURE I missed the known pipes or wires. And the pipes and wires don't lay up against the sheet rock - I needed something that would find them and inch of so away. Read the reviews - and DARN, etc! It does not work with an iPhone and we are an Apple family. Wait! The storm took out the Verizon towers - so we had used the Buick's On-Star to call my Team Rubicon daughter and son who were driving from NOLA to help and asked them to pick up a prepaid ATT phone for communication!So 'Droid phone problem solved when I found it!Ordered the Walabot, downloaded the app - watched all the how to videos (which I strongly recommend) and started scanning just as they suggested. And there it all was in the wall. You can pick a actual view (which is fuzzy outlines) or intelligent view which interprets it for you.FANTASTIC! Hit the center of the one stud I could use (which one of my >20 year old finders could easily do) - but drilled through for the wall anchor with absolute confidence I wasn't going to hit water or power lines. Worth every penny. And if I hadn't had the prepaid phone sitting there I would have just bought a used one on line. Great tool! Epilog - loan it to my DIY lady office manager for a succesful multi-shelf-mounting-project on a problem filled wall! SUCCESS 2X! Highly recommend it. Can't speak to the 1 star ratings except to say it is more complicated than a stud finder and once again recommend taking the time to watch all the videos!

When I first saw the video for the Walabot DIY a year or so ago, I was pretty impressed. I thought, "If this thing really works like they're showing, this would be MUCH better than just a regular stud finder." At the time, Amazon wasn't carrying the Walabot DIY, but I added it to my Amazon Wish List anyway, pointing to the external Walabot site.No one bought it for me for Christmas or for my birthday, so it languished on my Wish List.Then a specific need for it arose. We purchased a 42" flat screen TV for our guest bedroom and bought a wall mount so we could mount it. Because of how the furniture in the guest bedroom is arranged, we needed to mount the TV on the north wall of the bedroom, directly across from the wall where the bed is. As it turns out, that wall is the dividing wall between that bedroom and the master bathroom. The walls in the bedroom and bathroom are both drywall and we know there are wood studs in the wall, but because it's also a main plumbing wall, there are also pipes as well as electrical wires and some plywood in the wall. When I used my old trusty stud finder to try to find either of the two studs that should have been near the center of the wall, it would not reliably find either one. It would find what it thought was a stud lower down in the wall but at the height we wanted to install the TV mount, it would not find it. I knew I could hammer a nail in the wall to in the three places where the mounting lag screws for the TV mount would go, but I was worried that if there was a pipe back there, I would punch a hole in the pipe with the nail and that would be really bad news. Or worse, I might hit a pipe with the drill when I went to drill the holes.Then I thought about the Walabot DIY. I checked my Amazon Wish List and discovered that although I could still buy the Walabot directly from the manufacture's Website, Amazon was also now carrying it. The Amazon listing had over 1,200 reviews and it had 3.6 star rating out of 5 stars. Not spectacular, but not bad. I decided to check the ratings on Fakespot.com, which I often do. To my dismay, the ratings got a "D" grade on Fakespot with a note that there appeared to be a high degree of deception and misleading reviews. Not good.I almost decided not to buy it, but then I thought, "Hey, it's Amazon. If I get it and it turns out not to work nearly as well as they claim it works, I can just return it and get a refund and maybe look for a different type of stud finder to try instead."Boy, am I glad I decided to get it. I followed the setup instructions in the "Get Started" section of the very small user guide, then watched all of the video tutorials that the manual referenced on the Walabot site. I went in to the guest bedroom and calibrated the Walabot DIY on the wall as described in the video tutorial and started scanning. I first did a pan scan across about a 24" horizontal section of the wall near the center to get an idea of what the Walabot DIY thought was back there, then switched to the "Image" setting to get better detail. Sure enough, right where I thought a stud should be, the Walabot DIY said there was a stud. As I moved the Walabot DIY up and down on the wall in that spot, it cleared indicated the stud continuing both up and down from the spot where I had started scanning. Slightly below the level I wanted to install the TV mount, it also showed there was a pipe running horizontally across the wall -- exactly the type of object I wanted to make sure I avoided. I would have never know that was there in that area if I had relied simply on a regular stud finder. Some further scanning of the area I wanted to install the TV mount in, both the "Image" and "Expert" setting, gave me confidence that there were no other pipes or electrical wiring in that area that I might hit, so I lined up the mount on the wall, marked the drill holes in what was indicated to be the center of the stud, and drilled my holes.It was perfect! The TV mount is now attached securely to that stud in the wall and we hung the TV on the mount. This turned out to be a fully successful project, thanks to the Walabot DIY wall scanner. I'm happy to report that, at least from our use of it, it worked just as advertised and we're fully satisfied with it.