30-Aug Friday Fail: PiWars edition
Hey, look - it's Friday!
It's actually Thursday and I haven't gone to bed before midnight. That's because a new toy arrived! The Coretec 'Tiny 4WD' Robot Rover, which I bought from Pimoroni https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/coretec-tiny-4wd-robot-rover
For PiWars, we decided to have two robots, a spare kit robot for testing code while the "real" robot was being built or rebuilt.
This is the spare kit robot.
And there has been many failures today!
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I couldn't find a simple example of how to turn on one motor then the other. The sample code only turned them all on (and one motor wasn't working properly). The coretec code required the input library which wasn't working, I was tearing my hair out!! In comes Darren Townsend @ForrisHilier to the rescue! He suggested I use the Raspberry Pi guide: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/explorer-hat-buggy which had exactly what I needed.
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While trying to put the camera into the PiZero I popped off the camera holder. GAHH! I couldn't get it back on so I disassembled the whole thing and put on another PiZero (which I had to solder)
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The camera connector fell off on the second PiZero. GAHHHHHH!! I put the camera cable in then slotted the connector on over it and it seems to be staying for now
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One of the motors stopped working. When connected, the motor on the same pin sounded quite weak. I checked and it wasn't a cable problem. In comes Pi of Things to the rescue! @piofthings
He suggested trying to manually move the broken motor to see if it would get the gears moving. The shaft didn't move at all! After some persuasian with some pliers it moved manually then it worked with the code. Hurrah!
Lessons learnt this week: Sharing problems can lead to solutions :) Especially when you're part of an awesome community of Makers