Robot Kit – Day Three

Uh oh, we’re missing the brain bucket

The plastic rivets in the kit were a pain. Too small for my fingers. I fumbled for a long time and it wasn’t something you could help with. Finally it was time to put on the eyes.

Then you tried connecting the batteries to the brains. Beep!

Then we connected the brains to the eyes

But it did not work
But it did not work

The Arduino IDE upload to the robot failed with a stk500_getsync error.

We really wanted to turn it on. But it was getting late because we went trick-or-treating. So we had to save it for tomorrow.

Update: while you were asleep I figured out that I was following old instructions and using and old driver. The Makeblock websites were probably outdated in a few places. E.g., the old one said to select Arduino Uno. But what worked was using the Arduino Leonardo driver and choosing Arduino Leonardo as the board in the IDE. I uploaded the “Blink” test and the blue blinking LED was glorious. Then I tested the DC motors. One track spun the wrong way so I reversed the wires. Now both tracks spun forward with the Forward instruction as they should. The motors were wimpy because it looks like the batteries didn’t come pre-charged. So pop them in the charger, and I spent some time “child-proofing” the structure for j. A few twist-ties helped secure the brain bucket from tugging and snatching. We are ready for tomorrow. I didn’t want to introduce all these extra complications for you tomorrow; I wasn’t sure if I would lose your attention. But maybe I’m not giving you enough credit and I should have?

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