As some of you will have noticed from my forum posts, I had been having a few teething problems with the BrickPi3. It was hugely frustrating 'cos I’d followed all the instructions religiously and just couldn’t get the slightest response from the BrickPi3.
However, Matthew from Dexter saw my SOS messages and contacted me to work through the problems. We had a brilliant Skype call and Mathew remotely accessed the BrickPi3 to detect the problem - turns out it was a threshold configuration setting on the board that we marginally exceeded causing the board not to function.
Matthew was hugely sensitive and patient with me as I struggled to understand what was going on. Having reset the threshold condition, we updated the drivers and firmware (?). We then tested the BrickPi3 with some EV3 sensors and motors to ensure it was working correctly.
It was absolutely awesome being able to speak directly with the designer of the BrickPi3 board; and was hugely re-assuring.
Later in the week, I had bought 4 further starter kits from a UK distributor. However, it turned out that they didn’t have the same shield board as the US starter kits. In particular, the UK starter kits used a BrickPI+ board rather than a BrickPI3 board. At this point, I was completely panicked because I had to get assembled and working kits ready in double-quick time for a Technical Challenge with 5 teams. Matthew came to the rescue again !
Matthew answered my SOS call at around 11pm UK time, and accessing the starter kits from my flat, diagnosed and resolved the problem (which included an out of date OS).
I just can’t thank Matthew enough for his help with this. He really went the extra mile to help us !
We are now implementing deep convolutional networks directly on the BrickPi3 and BrickPI+, integrated with the Pi Camera for face recognition and face tracking. We plan as part of the Technical Challenge to integrate this EV3 sensor and motor functions. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY AWESOME !
a lot!! And