"Mysterious" BirckPi behavior

In september 2013 we ordered the BrickPi board (PCB). It was assembled by the electronic workers of our company. Cause we read that the 9V battery may be to low, we use a power supply which works with 10V.

After a couple of weeks we’ve done the flashing related to http://www.dexterindustries.com/BrickPi/design/a-first-robot/flashing-the-firmware/ - this was really hard work to do - thx for the compiled *.hex files.

Finished with the hard- and software, we tried the Scratch examples and everything worked “fine”.

At first just one chip worked so we could use MA, MB and S1 - how can we use S2 at Scratch? You can’t choose it by right mous clicking. We flashed once again the other chip and get MC and MD to work. We couldn’t try S3 and S4. We even edited the motor_test file to use all four motors and everything worked fine.

In our next step we tried the python examples. Chip1 (MA, MB and S1) worked fine but the other chip (with MC, MD, etc.) doesn’t work. So we tryed it once again with Scratch and it doesn’t work too. We restarted the raspberrypi and neither chip1 nor chip2 worked as well with Scratch as python.

We don’t understand this “mysterious” behavior. Sometimes everything works, sometimes just chip 1 works and sometimes nothing works.

We hope you can help us.

Just so I understand correctly, we sent you a bare PCB and you put the parts on and tried to flash it. Correct?

This is a really tough problem to troubleshoot! Did you change any of the parts on our published BOM? Did you successfully install the firmware to both chips? Did you successfully install the EEPROM memory to both chips?

It sounds like you’re having trouble around the sensors. Can you check all of the soldering around the sensor pins?

Just so I understand correctly, we sent you a bare PCB and you put the parts on and tried to flash it. Correct?

Yes.

My colleagues bought one new BrickPi. Our selfbuild one looks a little bit different but everything works now.

Ok, that sounds good: is everything working then?