Rover not receiving program

Help & Support Robot Parts
1

I have three V2 Rovers that I plan to control via XBee. Two of the rovers took their programs just fine and are running great wirelessly with the XBee units onboard and the WASD program provided downloaded into the Arduino. However, the third rover is not accepting the program. The com port for it is correct, I know all the set up is correct because it worked for the other two rovers, and it passed a loopback test no problem. I tried burning in the bootloader again and it still does not work. After 10 tries, the rover fails to accept the program and reads
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding
avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 10 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x08
Problem uploading to board.

I’m beginning to think that I just got a bad rover. Is there anything else I can do or should I just return it and get a new one? Thank you for your help.

2

Hi,

Well, that is unfortunate. As you may already be aware, this error code is a very generic type of error, as you can read about here, here (see selected answer) and here.

The usual culprits (aside from a faulty bootloader) would typically be something connected to the UART hardware pins TX/RX (pins D0/D1) that prevents proper reception of the code.
It should also be mentioned that if you are able to program a new bootloader, than the board itself is most likely working well (if the chip or its circuit was defective, programming the bootloader would be impossible).

Check the links above (if you have not already) and possible others you can find with a quick online search. If nothing else works, please post some pictures of your rover in programming setup. Make sure to clearly show all components, connections, etc.

Sincerely,