Will it get better?

[steve_jo]

Hi All,

I was lucky enough to get a new Robobuilder for Xmas. Enjoyed putting the kit together and it all worked first time except:

Battery wouldn't charge - kudos to Robosavvy for sorting that out quickly and getting me a new control box.

But serial number is different so motion files I have downloaded won't load - why on earth are motion files locked to a specific box?

Now trying to understand the motion builder software and the serial comms - via a USB to serial convertor - keep locking up so it's impossible to actually get far enough into the software to do anything.

I've had my win 7 PC bluescreen several times - it's has literally never done that before Motionbuilder and the USB to serial convertor.

So question to community - do things get better and by that I mean work reliably enough so you can concentrate on what you are trying to rather than battling faults?

Happy new year!

[geothelegend]

hi steve, i got my robobuilder for xmas and to start off with i found it all abit overwhelming tbh.
I had a few gears break and i couldnt work out how to do anything.
But after a week now and research and testing things are starting to go well and im feeling much more confident.
Here are my tips:

1. try to buy a pci expansion card which has a rs232 port on it, as the usb to serial converter leads are notourious for being abit dodgy.
Luckily the one i have seems to be fine.

2. Reinstall all the robobuilder stuff if you havent just to see if that helps at all.

3. Start off very slow with motionbuilder following the guides you get in the manual and guides online. For example just try to make the robot punch forwards or something.

4. you need to register the serial number on the new control box to use the downloaded motions im guessing. there should be one on the new control box.

5. If you have the money, try buying all metal gears for the servos, i have and its costing about £80 altogether including p & p, may be expensive to some people but the gears will pretty much never break with all metal.

6. Do everything veryyyy slowly, the mistakes iv made came from going to quick and running motions which caused the robot to move in wierd ways and break gears by pushing against itself too much.

7. The bluescreen error may or may not be related to the robobuilder software. My guess is that the usb to serial converter has something to do with it, therefore getting the expansion pci card should sort that out.

8. Just give it some time i thought id made a big mistake when things started to go wrong, now im having a good time with robobuilder

Hope iv been of some help.
Good luck

[steve_jo]

Thanks for that.

I've dug out an old computer with a serial port and on a first look it fixes all the comms problems.

Will spend some quality time over the next couple of days now it all seems to be working.

Still think locking downloaded files to specifc boxes is bonkers though. Will have to get my hex editor out and see if they are hackable - just on principle

Thanks again.

[i-Bot]

It is possible to change the serial number of the RBC, but maybe not if you have communication problems.
http://robosavvy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=24557

[steve_jo]

THanks for that - it's not a real problem. Just think it's bonkers. The rba files are plain text and the box serial number is hardly disguised at all - each char in the file is just 9 minus the corresponding char in the serial number.

I don't know why they bother.

Anyway better day today the direct serial link really does seem to have fixed pretty much everything. I've successfully messed with existing motion files and created new ones.

Only issue is that the robot falls over every time when walking backwards using the standard motion - haven't really investigated yet.

Cheers