Hello,
About 4 days ago I received the ALD5, I have assembled it and now am trying to do the “ver” test with the BotBoarduino board.
I am having problems with BotBoarduino board. It is endlessly blinking every 2 seconds. Below is a youtube video of this behavior.
I get the same results regardless if I am powering the logic using a 9 volt battery, USB power or wallwart power.
Video shows endless blinking pattern, there is also a small pop that emits from the board’s speaker when it’s port-pin pulses.
Blinking board Video:
youtu.be/0SHMTM6sgAU
Many pins on this board pulse every 2 seconds with 200mS pulse width. This 2 second pulse pattern occurs on almost every digital pin (Package pin 2,3,4,5,6,15,16,17,18…) of the Atmega uP.
The board is unresponsive to serial port commands and using the “ver” command.
Power supply is clean at 5.0V, the lowest this supply dips to is about 4.88V.
Ground is clean as well. Power supply measured at uP Vcc Pin.
-thanks
The Botboarduino does not accept any commands out of the box. The behavior you’re seeing is the test program that is loaded on the board at the manufacturer to test the boards. The “ver test” applies to the SSC-32.
The Botboarduino is an Arduino based microcontroller that we use to control various different robots. The board must be programmed with working code in order for it to really be useful.
Thanks Dev5994 for clearing this up for me.
The behavior did seem intentional. I was starting to wonder if a test program was left in the flash by accident. I see now that the board needs to be programmed with an application specific program.
thanks!
-jerry
Here’s the arm tutorial that uses a ps2 controller and the Botboarduino.
lynxmotion.com/images/html/build091b.htm
Dev5994,
You are a mind reader! This is exactly what I want to do with this bot!
thanks for the link!
-jerry
Hi,
I went back to see what was the source of my confusion…
I was following the Assembly instructions on the Arm Assembly Guide page:
AL5D Information
1a Assembly Guide for Base v2
and
2b Assembly Guide for AL5D Arm v2
My confusion was because the bottom portion of both of these guide sections refer to LynxTerm program and the results you should see using the LynxTerm program. I thought that the board that I had was just a “usb” version of the DB9 serial port board in the picture of the guide. The Arm guide states that I should use the LynxTerm program to “test the servos and confirm that they are plugged into the correct channels”.
In fact I had a very different board, the board in the assembly guide is a SSC-32 Server Controller with a pre-flashed controller program. The board I have is a Arduino based board that has a test program in it that basically just blinks a few LEDs and nothing more.
Thank you Dev5994 for straightening me out.
-trek
The arms have been sold with the SSC-32 for a really long time. We just recently started selling it with the BotBoarduino specifically for the PS2 control project. It looks like we need to look over the assembly guides to make them a little less SSC-32 specific. Sorry for the confusion. We will fix it! 
