Three silent days: it was a cable
- Log
- 15 of 26
- Date
- Reading
- 1 min read
Skills in this log
Something broke in this log. It is written up anyway.
On Thursday evening, the robot vanished from the network. Friday, Saturday, Sunday: nothing. I spent three days looking, and I thought the head board was dead.
The symptoms
- No presence on the network, neither the home one nor its own access point.
- Cold starts changed nothing.
- Not a single LED on the head board, neither power nor activity. The reset buttons did nothing.
- Only five motors lit up.
- The green LED on the base stayed on. But it only says the base gets power, even with the robot off.
What worked
I described the problem on the maker’s help forum on Sunday afternoon. First suggestion: reinstall the system. The install tool could not find the robot over USB. Second suggestion, an hour later: “check the power cable from the base, it comes loose if it lacks slack”.
That was it. The cable had slipped out of its connector, on the base side. Plugged back in, the robot was back within minutes, intact, with my program on board.
One detail not to forget: for the install attempt, I had flipped the small switch on the head board to DOWNLOAD. It has to go back to DEBUG for a normal start.
The cabling, so it does not happen again
The manual routes this cable through one eyelet, then round the back. The advice I got: run it through a central eyelet instead, which gives a few more centimetres of slack, and bundle it with the head’s USB cable using a tie or some tape.
The lesson
A silent robot, green LED on the base, no LED on the head board: before suspecting the hardware, follow the power cable from the base up to the head. It is now the first line of my troubleshooting list.
