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Aussie Sawppy - She rides....

A project log for Aussie Sawppy

An antipodean sibling

teamsgTeamSG 02/09/2020 at 14:070 Comments

With the first power up, I get my favourite fault: “Internal Error 500” when you tried to connect your smartphone to the on-board wireless network. The error that caused some furrowed brows during the bench test period a few months ago was back! So no smartphone access to the control interface. Doh!

After a brief, fruitless look for a solution, I bypassed the Pi's on-board network and just hooked up a monitor/mouse/keyboard directly to the Pi so that I could test the servos with the mouse on the Pi-hosted SGVHAK web page.

Setting aside that big, initial error, there were a few commissioning issues around the servo set-up. In a nutshell, at the right rear I managed to botch the drive and steer servo assignments. As a result, the first powered test saw that right rear steer servo think it was a drive and attempt to twist the link cable off. Whoopsie!

A bit of mucking around sorted that situation out with just a bit of fuss – connecting the laptop to the rover servo looms to run the servo configuration software..

AND... a couple of the servo couplers blew out where the threaded insert is fitted. I’m pretty sure that was a result of my dodgy, fumbly, initial attempts at the insert insertion process. I got better at it as I worked my way through the required 38 and don’t expect similar failures in the near future based on what I can see of the other ones. We’ll see.

And so ... back to the “Internal Error 500” problem… it seems that the error arises if you start the Pi with the BusLinker already connected.

The solution is to either...

...start the Pi with the BusLinker USB cable unplugged and then connect it once the Pi has settled...

OR...

...with the Pi already running you unplug / replug the BusLinker's USB cable.

I’m not exactly sure what the go is there. My guess is that the Pi needs to complete its start-up sequence and be idling in a steady state before the code on the BusLinker chip can initialise properly.

Happy to have that issue sorted.

And so, Aussie Sawppy makes its public debut (below) with the traditional ascent and descent of a strategically-placed backpack. 

Getting the rover going has been a cool achievement. Thanks go to the team here at home and to @Roger for having the guts and the gameplan to make his homage to Curiosity a public project.

Thanks, too, to @Roger for offering sage advice when I was flummoxed by the software side of the build.

Now for upgrades 😊 

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