Rubikuber motors do not run

[chris4]

I’ve had my BricKuber running since early 2019. I recently had a failure of the SD card and was forced to rebuild the OS from the start. This time I used a USB SSD with the 2019.04.05_Raspbian_For_Robots_by_Dexter_Industries_Stretch.img written using Raspberry Pi Imager on an iMac. This booted OK but I had to upgrade to Buster as there was at least one failed dependency. After the upgrade and a bit of tweaking BricKuber.py eventually ran but no arm or table movement.

Read_Info.py shows:

Manufacturer : Dexter Industries
Board : BrickPi3
Serial Number : 639D9855504B5354392E314BFF0F2140
Hardware version: 3.0.0
Firmware version: 1.4.8
Battery voltage : 11.9
9v voltage : 9.309
5v voltage : 4.999
3.3v voltage : 3.338

But i2cdetect -y 1 shows:

 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f

00: – – – – – – – – – – – – –
10: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
20: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
30: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
40: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
50: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
60: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
70: – – – – – – – –
I thought the on-board processor used I2C for programming?

/boot/config.txt has the following:

dtparam=i2c1=on
dtparam=spi=on
dtparam=i2c_arm=on
dtparam=i2c1=on
dtoverlay=brickpi3

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Smudger

[chris4]

I omitted to say that I’m using an RPi3B, version 1.2

[cyclicalobsessive]

Strongly suggest you use the latest “Legacy” Pi OS, and curl the BrickPi3 software onto it:

Install the latest “Legacy Pi OS” using the latest Raspberry Pi Imager

Then In order to quickly install the BrickPi3 repository, open up a terminal and type the following command:

curl -kL dexterindustries.com/update_brickpi3 | bash

[chris4]

@cyclicalobsessive

Many thanks for your rapid reply. I burned the latest Legacy Pi OS (32bit Buster 2022-09-22) onto my 120GB SSD, booted and ran the ‘curl’ operation. I had to also run ‘sudo pip install kociemba’ but that failed with message:

‘Command “python setup.py egg_info” failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-install-P8V3Uq/kociemba/’

until I changed the symlink in /usr/bin/python to point to /usr/bin/python3 rather than python2.

BricKuber now runs but still no motor action with neither the grabber nor table.

Edited brickuber_lib.py to change debug_print_commnds_on = True & debug_motor_commands_on = True

Now BricKuber.py runs in a loop printing ‘Current Position: 25’ ad infinitum, but no motor activity.

So, I’m in roughly the same situation as I was before but have found a much quicker way of installing the bootable image thanks to you.

Are there any test pograms that I’ve forgotten about in the intervening 3 years since I first built the rubikuber?

Cheers

Smudger

[chris4]

Added later:
Test_Connected.py:
BrickPi3 connected and running

Read_Info.py:
Manufacturer : Dexter Industries
Board : BrickPi3
Serial Number : 639D9855504B5354392E314BFF0F2140
Hardware version: 3.0.0
Firmware version: 1.4.8
Battery voltage : 11.822
9v voltage : 9.312
5v voltage : 5.004
3.3v voltage : 3.331

[chris4]

Ah-ha! My bad! Problem was that I had detached the motor cables from the BrickPi3 and had consulted a photo which used different ports. Once I’d found the right ports all was well as far as motors. Now I’ve got a problem with a wrong version of numpy for kociemba but I’m sure that is relatively easy to cure.

Thanks again.

[cleoqc]

The most worrisome problems often end up with easy to fix solutions! Thanks for working through this one and rebuilding the whole system from scratch. Those dependencies going away are a nightmare to deal with.