Communication error

#1

My eight year old got this mbot as a gift and I spent some time trying to get it working. After a frustrating evening, he finally got it to show some sign of life by flipping the power switch back and forth vigorously. We tried the 3 modes with the remote.
A. pushing the up button to make it go forward makes it move in an arc - it can’t go straight. It does turn left and right but it also has the same problem going backwards.
B. Wall avoidance robot mode - it just seemed to stutter
C. Line follower - it followed a line for a moment then threw itself in reverse and stuttered around a bit.

Not like the cool videos I saw online.

I was able to then get the software talking to it and we were able to get scratch programs loaded onto it. That was great fun - we definitely started to make some good progress.

Last night I shut it off and today I am unable to upload anything to it. I can’t reset it back to it’s default program. It does seem to be alive and working but the uploading just times out after a few seconds.

I have tried the reset, new batteries, praying to all the electronic gods. I have to wonder if I have a defective unit here. Is there some way to reset it to back to factory?

Please advise
Selwyn

#2

Well there has been a new development on the mbot front. This unit miraculously spontaneously recovered and seemed to work fine. Then some hours later when I turned it on, it failed in the same way as I described before. Now, another day later, I turned it on and it is working fine again. Is this a known intermittent problem or do I have a faulty unit?

thanks
Selwyn

#3

Heloo - is there anyone out there listening?

#4

have you tried to upgrade the mblock program to the latest version (3.21 at current)
and upgrade the firmware (from the Connect menu in the mBlock program)
and then reset the default program (from the Connect menu in the mBlock program)

#5

Hey Oxygen,
thanks for your response. I’ve continued to bang on this little device and have had some success. it seems to have settled down mostly. I just downloaded the mbot 3.21 and it seems to be behaving ok. This is quite a voyage of discovery for this programmer.
Selwyn

#6

I wrote up what I learned so far. Maybe others would find it useful. http://austinprogressivecalendar.com/blog/missing-docs-mbot-windows-pc

#7

Glad to hear it worked! :smile:

I would like to see a place on the makeblock forum where people like you share (program) solutions to educate others!

#8

yeah, might not be a bad idea. I finally got the bluetooth stuff working - that really is awesome. I posted my notes at http://austinprogressivecalendar.com/blog/mbot-and-bluetooth-magic

#9

glad that it worked and thank you for sharing

#10