So, it’s a rough start for Flotilla…
I bought the Treasure chest on Kick starter when it first came out, and then got busy. Moved house a couple times, new job, etc. Only now getting started.
Read through the installation, seemed straightforward, but seemed to take a long time.
Figured I’d make the most of the time and read up on this toy. http://flotil.la. See the kickstarter page. Huh? I’m looking for resources, learning, etc. Not more sales.
At some point stumbled across learn.flotil.la. 404. Crap.
Then found mention of learn.flotil.la/getting-started. Finally noticed the cookbook link in the upper right.
About this time, I finally got the Raspberry Pi 2 up and running with a Noobs distro. Upgraded it to wheezy.
‘sudo -i’, Installed flotilla (or so I thought), and off we go…
Then I noticed that message that said I have to be a user that can sudo, not root.
Okay, reran it, it seemed to go okay. When I started flotilla, and hooked the hub up, it said it needed an upgrade. Clicking on upgrade took me to the completely unhelpful store page.
Had to start looking at paths…ah! the permissions were wrong on /home/pi/Pimoroni/flotilla.
chmod 777 /home/pi/Pimoroni/flotilla
Reran install, saw a lot more output this time (including flotilla-python). Okay, can now upgrade the hub. (0.01 to 1.12) Yay.
Tried balance…it works. Tried Bat and Ball, it couldn’t recognise the dial. The dial itself lights up when turned, so I know it’s getting power…it’s just that the software can’t see it, so no bat and ball today. Bummer.
Tried marble maze, it couldn’t recognise the motion module was plugged in.
I haven’t bothered going through the rest of the modules at this point. Do I have bogus modules? Have they changed in later production so that they don’t work with the latest firmware? Does each module have firmware that also needs to be updated?
For something that’s meant to be simple, this feels rather sharp and jagged. I’m in IT, and it took me hours of tinkering just to get to this point. No way could I have kept my son’s interest during this.
Any suggestions?
-Ken