Testing S3DGPIO for Win 10 in a school

After testing at home – uploaded my modified Scratch Desktop to dropbox and took the robot into school

Software install went fine – logged onto dropbox -downloaded my zip file and unzipped it to a shared drive (M: in this case) and ran it – loaded in fine and able to select the S3DGPIO extension.

But I’d forgotton that I was connecting to the school WiFi so I had to go thru the faff of setting my phone to be a hotpot with my home SSID – VNC into the robot (I just use the RealVNC Chrome browser extension to do this) and then select the school wifi/password on the Pi network icon

Of course, once I did this, I lost connection to the robot and has to power cycle it and then tried to connect again via school Wifi. This basically failed several times and I couldn’t even ping it 🙁 But after giving up and then trying one more time – it worked #Gremlins

Then after all this setting up and testing it out beforehand – it failed when the coding clubbers tried to use it. 🙁

The modified Scratch Desktop loaded no problem but they couldn’t get the robot to do anything.

1st thing that came to me is that I hadn’t enabled the IP address display on the side of the robot – which at least would have told me if it was connecting to the network.

Also, the connect block in S3DGPIO is a command block so you don’t get any feed back as to whether its connected to S3DGPIO – I’ll need to modify things to improve that

Also, it was hard to find the Pi using Fing app on my phone as it didn’t display the name of the Pi – I’ll have to see if there is something on the Pi that can be configured to improve its visbility in the app

But the big question is (assuming it was on the network and working) – why did it not respond to commands.

Turns out its because I now have easy to use blocks with dropdown menus so its VERY easy to select the wrong AddOn

(Previously, Scratchers would enter the name of the addon manually. They might not have typed it right but unlikely to have typed something that was another valid add-on)

And it turns out, that once you’ve specified an Addon and sent the command to the Pi – it doesn’t like to then be told the addon is a different one and can get very confused and doesn’t respond properly!

So I need to sort out that as well

I might be looking for volunteers to do some testing 🙂

 

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