Sumovore Manual

The Solarbotics Sumovore
Building the Body - 8 / Troubleshooting
Step 16: Installing the Wheels: No magic or mystery here. Well, maybe just a bit. First mount the traction bands onto the wheel
hub. The easiest way we’ve found is to stretch the rubber band between your thumb and forefinger (the one you point with when
you’re not shooting rubber bands), and pry the hub in onto the bottom half. Then tilt it in so the top half seats against the other
half of the rubber band.
When you’ve mounted the bands, put them onto the shaft of the gear motors and secure them with the remaining two #2 x 1/4”
pointy screws. Now you can repeat the tests you did in step 15 with a live, moving Sumovore!
Stretch band between finders... ...slide bottom of wheel in... ...and slide top of wheel in!
Hopefully this section will be totally disregarded, but if you’re still reading, then you must have a Sumovore problem. Let’s see
what we can do to fix you up.
The first level of inspection is to carefully examine all your solder joints to make sure you have sufficient solder on each, and that
they’re all nice and shiny. About 70% of all failures we see are due to poor soldering so don’t simply say “Uhh... my soldering is
just fine - there must be a bad component!” Take the time to go over your connections again, even if you have to clip gear motor
zip-ties and peel sticky tape apart. You can always get more zip-ties and use hot-glue for the motors if you really need to. If the
basic soldering inspection didn’t reveal any failures, then let’s use a bit more analytical process to isolate the problem.
Red LED not coming on? If the red LED at the back isn’t turning on, there is most likely a failure on the edge sensor circuit
board, or there’s a problem with power connections. Check for:
! Battery polarity & charge - are batteries all in the right-way around, and have a full charge?
! Battery pack connections are correct? Black wires go to square pads, remember?
! There is a set of battery connection points for each pack, so make sure each pack is wired to the right place.
! The IR LEDs and rear red LED are in the right way around? They won’t light up if they’re in backwards.
! Front edge sensor circuit board sitting on all 8 pins? It’s easy to accidently move 1 pin over so you’re only connecting to 7.
! If you have a voltmeter, check the voltage at the rear of the mainboard near the power switch in the box labeled ‘DIAG1’.
You should measure 9 volts (the full battery voltage) between a round pad and a square pad when the power switch is on. If
not, there’s a bad power connection someplace...
Sumovore Spinning on the spot? First identify if one motor is dead, or spinning in reverse. If it’s spinning, then the simple
answer is to go back to the terminal blocks and reverse the connections for that motor. If the motor is dead, check for:
! Sufficient insulation stripped off wire going into terminal block. Bare wire has to be clamped in the block.
! Try manually spinning the motor with power off. If it’s considerably hard than spinning the functional motor, you most likely
have a shorted motor. Check the motor terminal tabs and make sure nothing is shorting against the metal motor body
Sumovore Suspiciously Slow? Check the L293D installation. It’ll work backwards, but much slower than normal!
Edge Sensors ALWAYS Triggering? One or more of your QRD1114 edge sensors are in backwards!
Troubleshooting
More troubleshooting answers on the next page...