Vorpal stoped working - just beeping

[Jens Dittmar]

Hello,

first off, a great project and great, that it got released for everyone. - So yes, I did not buy the bundle, I bought the parts (already had some) my self.

At first, the Vorpal robot was actually working for me in all but RC mode (means Demo was working correctly). RC he only got garbage.

When I tried to fix that I must have made a mistake because since then, nothing is working at all.

When turned on, only a short reaction to the servos and a repeating beep sequence is played. I could not find any reference, what these beeps are meaning, therefore I made a video of it that you will find by this link:

Vorpal beeping youtube

So regardless of the selected mode at the potentiometer, the result is always the same as to see in the video.

I double-checked the cables at least 10 times but could not find anything wrong, I even switched out all cables and most of the other components as well. The software at the robot I flashed again a few times as well.

I am running out of ideas and it would be great to get it to work at some point (also wanted to make a post at my blog about it once it is finished :) ).

Thanks in advance.

Jens

[vorpalrobotics]

Thanks for the kind words, and sorry you're having trouble.

That almost sounds like it's rebooting over and over again. Could you plug in the USB and bring up Arduino monitor and see what, if any, messages print? Copy/paste them into a response on this thread and I'll see whats going on.

If it's rebooting over and over, that more or less guarantees there's a short circuit somewhere. This could be hard to find, as sometimes one of the servo motors is defective in a way that causes a short. To find that, you unplug motors one at a time until it stops happening. The last one you unplugged is the culprit.  But it could be a short anywhere. I've even seen the pot cause a short due to a defect caused by holding the soldering iron on it too long.

Anyway, first things first, let's see what messages are coming out of the serial port. (Make sure the serial is set to 9600.)

[Jens Dittmar]

Hi,

thanks for the fast reply.

The console looks like this over and over again (one block for each beep combination):

16:31:52.723 -> 

16:31:52.723 -> #RV2r1a

16:31:52.723 -> TRIMS:unset

The motors I checked as you mentioned, but nothing changed by unplugging one at a time for all of them (switching off and on in between).

For the soldering, this was done only after the issue occurred as I wanted to switch out all cables and this plug connections to make sure none of them is causing this issue.