Hi,
A few days ago I got my makeblock starter kit, plus a ME Shield to connect my raspberry. I've been trying to get it to work together, I followed the guide at http://learn.makeblock.cc/s4rpi/ , and everything looks right, but when I run the demo program, it does nothing besides asking for speed motor, but nothing more. I dont know how to troubleshoot this..Because this is only the demo script which only set up the motor speed. You can change the script to get more function.
I get that, but I expect the demo to turn on one engine (M1), when I input a speed… but it doesnt.
Anyone can help? Im starting to feel very frustrated about the robot kit… 
I installed firmware for mbot on the arduino orion, but it keeps doing nothing at all… I dont even know if the MESHIELD is working ok or is a hardware problem… Please, need help over here.
just updating. Finally I gave up trying to use the ME shield for raspberry pi. As anyone can see, support is far from being good. If someone is facing this problem, you can check my solution at https://itsallaboutcuriosity.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/sending-instructions-from-raspberry-pi2-to-arduino-orion-makeblock-shield/ And of course, if you are thinking about connecting raspberry to makeblock Orion, I dont recommend to buy the ME shield. Is really frustrating.
Please contact via email ander@makeblock.cc to get help, we are on national vocation now. Sorry for your troubles here.
Una
Hi,
I have the same issue as above.
I followed all the steps of http://learn.makeblock.cc/s4rpi/
and connected a motor to port M1. when i run the serial test script it doesnt do anything.
when i connect the usb port to my windows laptop and use mblock to start the motor the motor is working. (i can see on the raspberry that the port is blocked when i fire up the motor in mblock)
when i tried the ultrasonic sensor program on port 3 of the Orion i dont get any results back. (on the orion i can see the RX light blinking) so i think the raspberry is trying to connect to the Orion.
My Setup is Makeblock Orion with Raspberry shield and Raspberry B+ .
Raspberry OS and firmware are fully updated.
I dont know what to test or try.
Any advice is welcome.
Kind regards,
René
My best advice is to give up on the shield, and look for another way of getting them to work together (the pi and the orion), I lost about 2 weeks trying and got nothing, and as you can see support is not going to help you. I bought a cheap bluetooth module for the pi, and got it to work in a couple of hours, If you plan to follow this aproach, let me know if I can help you.
regards.
Hi Carlos,
Many thanks for your quick reply!
I am open for your solution and would like to know how you managed to get it working with bluetooth.
How are you powering your PI & Orion ? (i would like to let the pi moving with the orion.)
Also for the support of Makeblock i would like to get the Shield working. (please create a working manual. )
Kind regards,
René
I also had lots of problems with the sample code out there for the shield so I started writing some of my own and thus far I have quite a bit working. Haven’t try tried anything with motors but I have a bunch of other sensors working from an RPi2 via Python. Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/jafletch/makeblock-serial/
Please see my review for the Shield I submitted earlier this month. The review is in four parts, the only reviews on the Shield to date that I know of.