Hi,
We are running the Orbit Odyssey camp this weekend and are having a little troubles connecting to the XRPs over bluetooth. Sometimes we can connect over bluetooth, if the cable is connected, but as soon as we remove the cable we lose the bluetooth connection. Without the cable we see the xrp in the list of pairable devices but when selected it never completes the connection.
Not sure what to try, is there something that we can try to get the laptops to connect to the XRP over bluetooth reliably?
We recently published a set of FAQs on bluetooth in the user guide. https://xrpusersguide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/course/FAQ.html
Batteries are always the first thing to check. A cable will supply extra power to the XRP and the bluetooth chip may not be getting enough power without a cable plugged in.
Otherwise, check the FAQs to see if they help.
Hi,
I looked through the document and the best I can see is that the batteries might be low. I bought some brand new Energizer batteries (1.5v) and put them in. the multimeter shows each of the batteries at 1.56 volts, at the barrel plug I am measuring 6.2v going into the board. so, it looks like the board is getting a fair amount of power. When turn the board on and plug in the cable I can connect to the bluetooth. If it take the cable out and just have the batteries I cannot maintain or re-establish a connection. I have tried refreshing the browser, restarting my machine, resetting and restarting the xrp.
the one thing to note is that we are using the older “beta” boards (these: SparkFun Experiential Robotics Platform (XRP) Controller - Beta - SparkFun Electronics).
thoughts?
Things can get confusing if you attach a cable and connect as bluetooth. The web serial and web bluetooth in the browser will both see the connection and can give odd results. Best to work with just one at a time.
The beta board should not make a difference. The other thing to do is to make sure your library files are all up to date. You can force a reload of the libraries by deleting the file XRPlib/version.py And the other is to try and make sure the last program you run is ending and not in an infinite loop. Best, is to create a small program that just turns on the LED and then ends. Run that with the cable attached and then try connecting via bluetooth.
Thanks for the info.
Update -
I connected to the xrp via a cable, deleted version.py and reconnected. I refreshed the browser page to force it to drop the connection. Reconnected via cable and it updated the xrp to 2.1.3
I then ran a simple blocks program that turns on the led, pauses for 2 seconds and then exits. that program runs fine.
I then pulled out the cable, turned off the xrp, and rebooted my computer. A little overkill but wanted to be sure there was no dangling data.
After my computer restarted, loaded the xrp editor page, restarted the xrp and waited more than 30 seconds, I then tried to connect via bluetooth, it scanned for a while and finally told me there are no compatible devices.
follow up …
The good news is that one of our mentors and his son ( a student on the team ) figured out a set of steps that got the XRPs up and running. yeah!
The not as good news is that I am not sure any of us can say exactly what the issue(s) was(were). i.e. we don’t think we got to the root cause.
What was addressed/done/observed along the way to allow the connections:
- Some of the xrps had the wrong version of the library on them. We used the deletion of the version.py file to force them to be updated to the correct version
- One of the XRPs, despite having fresh batteries, only ever lit up one of the power led on the board (sys). we put that board aside.
- The last thing we did was to clean up connections associated with the page. On the left of the address bar in the web page there is a button to get to the connections off a page. in the image below you can see a long list of abandoned connections. Whether that was a problem, i cannot say, what can be say is that it is a lot of debris that needed to be cleaned up.
@Fgrossman, Thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully what we ended up doing can help others that run into the issue when trying to connect over bluetooth.
The one board that is only showing 1 LED, sounds like there is a bent pin. This video shows how to fix that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpV9_qn0hYs&t=734s
The list of “abandoned connections” are the XRP boards that have been connected via a cable. The browser remembers those and when one of those is connected again we will auto connect to the XRP without having to press the Connect button.
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