weirdness with micro:bit uploading on OS X

[Angi Chau]

Hey Maker Ed hive mind,

I need some help. My resident engineer and I are trying to help a science teacher port a robotics project from Lego NXT to microbit (via the micro:bot kit from Sparkfun). We are running into a weird issue with the uploading that has been replicated in both of our Mac laptops (both running OS 10.11 El Capitan) and different micro:bit boards.

We know that when you copy the HEX file over to the micro:bit "drive", the drive is expected to eject itself as part of the auto-restart process, the OS will report that it was ejected improperly, and this is all no big deal.

BUT, what we are seeing is that the drive seems to be auto-ejecting itself too soon, i.e. before the OS recognizes that the file copy has finished, and when this happens (about 80-90% of the time), it hangs up the OS for a few minutes (where sometimes we even see a second Mac HD icon appear on the desktop as everything stalls), which can add up to not only significant precious class time but also significant student frustration.

This is happening regardless of if the moto:bit board is plugged into the micro:bit or not.

Has anyone else experience this?

Thanks!

Angi

-- 

Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

[David Held]

I'm running 10.11(.6) and have been programming Microbits all afternoon/week. I have never had this problem or heard of it. Have you tried a PC or Chromebook? Different cable? 

David

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David Held
Dir. of Technology

Poughkeepsie Day School
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[Angi Chau]

I'm running the same OS as you 10.11.6 - not yet tried Chromebooks (we don't have any at our school) or PC but since all our students carry Macbooks, we need to get it working on OS X or it won't matter much.

I just did a test where I bypassed OSX and did the transfer on Terminal using UNIX commands and in the 10 times I've tried it so far, have not replicated the same failure!! So that seems to point to an OS issue, but I don't understand how 10.11.6 would be acting weird for me and not for you.

I've also updated the firmware on the microbit to the latest version (0243) and that didn't seem to make a difference.

-- 

Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

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[David Held]

Did it flash in the Terminal w/ the same cable?   Is the LED flashing whenyou are copying the HEX file? 

I found this:

3. If the yellow LED does not light up, it is likely that either your USB lead has developed a fault, or even your computer might have powered down the USB port (this can happen if you short-out your micro:bit when running from USB and plugging in electronic components). Try another lead, or try another USB port on your computer. Some Mac's when they power down their USB port require a restart for the USB port to recover - so try restarting your computer.

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[Angi Chau]

Woops video was too large to attach, so here's a link to it on my Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/97z8kfl8r7duezz/microbit%20weirdness.mov?dl=0

-- 

Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:41 PM, Angi Chau <ac...@castilleja.org> wrote:

I am using the exact same cable with Terminal and it flashed successfully. In both cases, the yellow LED flashes furiously when the HEX file is copying.

I've attached a screen recording of what happens -- I had to sleep notifications so the video won't capture the continuous chatter on our robotics team's Slack, so you can't see when it notifies me of the improper disk eject. But you can see when it ejected the microbit drive before the copy window closes, which is what seems to hang it up. When it's stalled, you see two Mac HD icons plus the Microbit drive icon. And then after the stall, it reports that the copy failed.

-- 

Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

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[David Held]

Is the file too big? I can't tell from the video but is it over 500k? It only has 256k RAM I believe.

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[Angi Chau]

Oh the file is 567k... could that be an issue?

-- 

Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

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[David Held]

I think so. Take a simple smaller program and try to load it.

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[David Held]

Can you send me the file? I'm going out for dinner soon, but I could give it a try or take a look and see if there is a way to shrink it. Another option could be to use the radio option and use another Microbit to send commands to the robot.

[Angi Chau]

And I just tried downloading an empty file (i.e. empty OnStart and Forever loops) but the HEX is still >500kb?!?

Here's the hex file we are trying to upload... but the fact it uploads fine via Terminal leads me to think it might not be the file?

-- 

Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

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[David Held]

It loaded OK on one of my Microbits as far as I can tell.A and B  buttons display numbers. One thing I noticed from your video is that it seemed to take a long time to load up. The file loaded for me in about 3 seconds. I guess the 500+k is just the file size and not the memory size.

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[Angi Chau]

Reporting back to the group... in case anyone's curious...

With David's patient help, we tried to figure out why we were seeing the odd microbit upload issues but never ended up finding out the specific cause other than it seemed to only be happening on school-owned Macs and not on personal or student-owned laptops. So whew -- our microbit project is now running in the science classes and no student has yet reported getting this strange error. Despite not having solved the mystery, I guess we should still count our blessings! :)

Thanks,

Angi

-- 

Angi Chau, PhD
Director of Bourn Idea Lab, Faculty Advisor for Robotics @ Castilleja School
650-470-7756 (direct)
ac...@castilleja.org

WOMEN LEARNING  |  WOMEN LEADING

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[John Umekubo]

Angi, thank you for keeping us informed. Sounds like it might be a file permissions setting on the Mac OS side from the school. Most likely, the accounts you are logging into on the school computers are not admins of those computers, so Micro:bit may be running into an issue being able to write the files it needs. 

- john

John Umekubo about.me/jumekubo

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[chris thompson]

I am having this same issue. It often requires a restart of my Mac. Any ideas what is causing this?

-chris thompson

[chris thompson]

Problem solved! For me it was Sophos AV software. When I exclude the micro:bit the problem went away. I expect the schools had AV software on their Macs as well.

[Jeff Tillinghast]

I'm having a similar problem with High Sierra-- I'm attempting to copy HEXs over, and it seems like it's ejecting improperly (getting eject warning). After I tried the first program, the micro:bit has been totally bricked. I tried copying over the factory reset HEX from the website, no good. I've tried it on two different boards now with the same result: dead boards. My account is administrator on the machine, and I don't have Sophos running. 

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Jeff

[David Held]

Micro:bit is testing a new firmware (where the copying to the Micro:bit is automatic). You could give it a try. I believe the testing is just about over and will be released soon.

https://microbit.org/testing/#web-usb

David Held

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David Held

Making With Held

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