Rpi3 + GoPiGo3 not booting up (GoPiGo3 green light blinks forever)

GoPiGo
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Hello~

I was so excited to receive my GoPiGo3 today!!!

I bought the “GoPiGo3 Robot Base Kit” on Amazon (sold by Dexter Industries) and
the “CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Ultimate Starter Kit - 32 GB Edition” also on Amazon…
and they were both in my hands (literally) a few hours later :slight_smile:

I spent the afternoon assembling it all together and I have spent the last 8 hours trying to get the GoPiGo3 to boot up :frowning:

I have tried everything & I have read every tutorial & I have watched every video related to GoPiGo and/or RaspberryPi in existence and nothing has worked.

Although I bought an SDCard came with NOOBs installed, I have also tried reformatting it (several times) after which I tried fresh installing several of the various OSes that are available (NOOBs, Raspbian, Ubuntu, DexterOS).

Each time I:

  • inserted the formatted & OS-installed SD card into the Rpi3
  • connected a power supply (I have tried using the USB-Rpi3 power supply & the GoPiGo3 battery pack & also both)
  • pressed the ON button

and each time:

  • the Rpi3 red light goes solid
  • the Rpi3 green/yellow light blinks (seemingly haphazardly)
  • the GoPiGo3 green light blinks forever (steadily)

I do not see GoPiGo (or anything similar) on Wifi.

When I connect an ethernet cable to the Rpi3, the Rpi3 ethernet LEDs are both illuminated solid.

The GoPiGo3 robot’s antennae LED has never illuminated.

Please let me know how I should move forward from here…
or if you have any suggestions for me to try.

I am freaking exhausted… and honestly… sorta over the GoPiGo3 :o(

Thank you so much in advance~
Loretta :o)
www.linkedin.com/in/lorettarules

2

I would also like to note that the acrylic pieces arrived with some very minor chips and cracks in it…
I wasn’t sure if that was normal or not because (in my opinion) the acrylic pieces look like they could have been cut by a person (who is very very skilled & experienced), as opposed to a machine… (please don’t be offended, im no acrylic expert and maybe thats just the way acrylic looks, im just explaining why I didn’t care about the cracks… i was also very excited & not willing to wait for a replacement :slight_smile:

The external box the shipment came in looked perfectly normal and damage-free.

I am just noting that perhaps the GoPiGo3 parts were damaged somehow?

Thank you~
Loretta :o)
www.linkedin.com/in/lorettarules

3

Hi Loretta,

I’m terribly sorry you’ve had issues booting up your Raspberry Pi. Because of this, I’m going to reiterate what needs to be done in order to get it up and running.

  1. For your Raspberry Pi, you need to have a micro SD Card with a DexterOS image on it.
    You can download the latest DexterOS image from here. Download it and un-archive it.

  2. Plug in your micro SD Card into your laptop (or adapter for SD cards) and using Win32DiskImager or Etcher, burn the image to your micro SD Card.

  3. Insert it in your Raspberry Pi and with the GoPiGo3 already stacked on top of your Raspberry Pi, boot up the Raspberry Pi.

Following these 3 steps, you should see the red power LED turn on, whilst the green state LED of your Raspberry Pi (and not the one of the GoPiGo3 board) should haphazardly blink, with no apparent coherence if you catch my drift.
After a minute or so, you should see the green LED on the GoPiGo3 board light up just like in the following scenario:
File 11-12-2017, 20 21 26

Next up, you should see on any wireless-enabled machine the GoPiGo network showing up.

If you don’t see any network show up, could you then hook up the Raspberry Pi to a TV that has an HDMI port? Apropos, before hooking it up to a TV screen, shutdown the Pi and after you get it connect and then power it up again. What we want to see is if we get any output on the TV at all - photos from you should be more conclusive.

Another thing I want to bring the attention to is Raspbian. As far as I understand, you had used this image from the Foundation’s website and after booting up your Raspberry Pi, you didn’t see any output on the monitor/TV.
Can you confirm this?

The last thing is about the acrylics and there are 2 matters that need to be discussed:

  1. The minor chips or cracks.

  2. The quality of the acrylic’s cutting.

Regarding the minor chips or cracks.

Regarding the minor chips or cracks, it’s not normal to have them. I’m telling you this as I have experience in the manufacturing process of acrylics, but it may also be that you’re referring to the rough edges a laser cut can do.
See, when an acrylic is laser cut, the beam of heat from the laser melts the edges and the material starts to protrude to the exterior. When the material cools down, the edges will feel rough and small parts of the protruded material could break and fall. Some people prefer to sand paper and others don’t do it. Also, the protrusion of the material gets bigger as the thickness of the acrylic increases.

I’m really curious to see what you’re referring at, so could you make some close-up photos of the acrylic where you think there are chips or cracks?

Regarding the quality of the acrylic’s cutting.

The laser cut should be as straight as possible and should look professional. When the laser is set to a higher power than normal for a given thickness of the acrylic, the cut may appear as it hasn’t been done by a machine, but by a human. Take this as a fact and not like this is the case for it - I’m just stating facts here.

Could you make some photos to show us what you’re referring at? And we’re in no way offended by these, how could someone be? Actually, when customers come back with feedback, we’re quite happy as this is an opportunity for us to better our products.

Cheers!

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@loretta, I also wanted to hop in here. I’m really sorry to hear about the frustrations with getting started. Robert got everything correct. I wanted to point out two things (a little bit of resummarizing here):

  1. It sounds like you want DexterOS. Installation instructions are here for putting it on an SD Card. It sounds like you might have installed Raspbian for Robots. You will only see the GoPiGo WiFi network with DexterOS; you won’t see it appear with Raspbian, Raspbian for Robots, Noobs, etc.
  2. It sounds like you have successfully burned something to your SD Card; but again, it might not be DexterOS. The direct download for the DexterOS software is here.

Please let us know how it goes. Thanks and we’re sorry for any confusion once again.

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hi @RobertLucian & @JohnC ~

thank you for replying!

obvi, i was VERY frustrated that night :\

i was just soooo excited to receive my GoPiGo (amazon 2-hour delivery!)…

and after hours carefully setting it up (more than once)…
because i missed the camera install… then several times for the sd card…
btw the GoPiGo makes it SUPER difficult to access the RaspberryPi’s SD card slot…
i also snapped my new sd card that night trying to pull it out without disassembling my GoPiGo :'o(

anyways… sorry if i came off rude, i was just really frustrated & disappointed :o(

*** HERRO: you should DEFFOS post required SD card info on the instructions page (https://studio.dexterindustries.com/cwists/preview/1218x) and the instructional/assembly YouTube videos***

i read & re-read, watched & re-watched everything available on the world wide web so many times that night, im pretty sure i could recite most of them by heart :o)

anyways i already sent it back to amazon :o(
and had another robot in my hands again with amazon 2-hour delivery :o)
i dont like waiting hehe

if you happen to receive the one i had back… check out the acrylic… its definitely not cut well… unless some of the circle holes are supposed to go all the way to the edge (so more like a bite out of a sandwich, instead of a hole)

btw do you guys do custom acrylic/robots (MyPiGo :smiley:
i did just order the BrickPi (and various other robot pieces) because im trying to make myself a custom robot!

i hate to be super annoying but one more thing… please keep the paper on the acrylic for the instructional videos/images (at least some of it) OR use a NON-white table… its pretty difficult to see!

oh last QUESTION — why is the caster wheel hole an oval, not a circle (why is it bigger than the screw)?

thank you very much!
Loretta :o)

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Yep, this is on purpose. Removing the card while the power is on corrupts the SD card. This is by design: it should be hard to get it out.

We do not, sorry to say.

Thanks for the tip, we’ll try to improve that on the next round.

The size is meant to make it a little easier to assemble. Sometimes the caster wheels can come with the wings a little bent, even by a few degrees, and if everything is rigid, it can be harder to assemble. The ovals let the posts slide a little more in assembly.

7

@JohnC In your first post, you pointed @loretta to instructions for flashing her SD card. Since you say you’ve intentionally designed your product to make the SD card difficult to remove, perhaps you should offer her a warranty replacement of her broken SD card.

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Hi @dexterrobotuser : we designed the GoPiGo3 so that it is not easy to remove (especially accidentally) the SD Card. What we found was that users were accidently popping the SD Card out while the robot was powered on, and that corrupted the SD Card.

Also, by @loretta’s post, she did not buy an SD Card from us.

All that being said, it seems that @loretta had a hard time figuring out which software to use. To get her on the right track we offered to send an SD Card with the software already burned to it.

So, it seems you may be conflating a few issues here, so I’ll summarize:

  1. The SD Card wasn’t bought from us,
  2. The SD Card wasn’t damaged by our hardware (in fact the opposite, probably protected by our hardware) and
  3. We did indeed reach out directly and offer to send an SD card to get things going.
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@dexterrobotuser - good looking out bro… thank you!!!

@JohnC - awww :o( i was going to give GoPiGo another chance just because @dexterrobotuser’s comment warmed my heart so much, but nevermind now boooo

re: SDcard~
yes, its true… i did not buy my SDcard from dexter industries… in fact, i was unable to get the GoPiGo3 running the first day and, due to being much too frustrated by the dexterindustries.com site, i sent it back the very next day, so, unforch, i did not buy anything from dexterindustries :o(

re: SDcard design~
specifically, what elements of the GoPiGo3 were designed for the purpose of making the SDcard removal harder?
because, to me, it looks like quite the opposite… as a newcomer, the GoPiGo3 looks as if it was designed specifically to make accessing the SDcard easier — im talking about the finger-sized hole right next to the SDcard (see image below)

if you want to discourage SDcard removal while connected to power, perhaps have the power input right next to the SDcard slot, so that the input cable juts in front of the SDcard, thus disabling its removal?

re: offer to send me an SDcard~
sadly, i did not receive this message, but i really wish i had… perhaps because of the aforementioned frustrations i had with your website? i can elaborate more, upon request…
but, overall, i think you should do a simple “fresh eyes test” (as i call it, when i do ui/ux consulting work)… meaning: hand your product to a person who has zero experience with it whatsoever, stand back (do not assist) and watch them try to put it together…
company founders usually find this test incredibly insightful & i find that usually a few trivial changes here and there make a world of a difference, especially for new users

thank you~
Loretta :o)

www.linkedin.com/in/lorettarules

dexter_hole

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Thanks for all the feedback Loretta! We’ll definitely put a fresh eyes look on our startup directions and getting started. Appreciate all your comments!

11

Hello, I have the same problem as loretta, except even if I re-burn the SD card, it still is not connecting. It flashes green infinitely.