#mBot 1/mBlock - Installation, execution and Bluetooth connection.

9 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

tight badge
#

hi everyone! i'm a robotics tutor, and i'm currently trying to setup mBlock on my personal laptop to be able to prepare classes in advance and test things out

Context

for anyone unfamiliar with Makeblock, they're a chinese company who provide small robots, programmable with blocks/arduinoc/python for educational purposes.

our center has two mBots, which have proven rather annoying to work with, as they require specific drivers (MLink, CH340)

now, mBlock - the IDE used for programming mBot and other Makeblock devices - has two versions: an online one, and a downloadable one.
the online version seems to work fine, except it seems to not support bluetooth connection, which is virtually needed if i want this thing to run around without having to follow it with my laptop in hand

additionally, as of a few years ago, Makeblock has stopped providing resources for linux distributions, so i'm forced to try to find alternative ways of getting it to work - so here we are.

Actions Taken

to get started, i went ahead and got wine and wine-mono as mBlock is built on .NET; i installed the mlink driver through the deb package provided in the official website, promptly started by running
mblock-mlink start

the mBlock app itself was obtained from the respective official download page, and installed using wine. as for the ch340 driver, it seems like ch341 contains? or packages? ch340, and comes pre-installed (see Img. 1) - i deduced this from finding the manufacturer website and reading the "application scope" field (see Img. 2)

Out of characters - follow up message below

image.png image.png
#

Problem(s)

MBlock opens, but does not work properly.

--- opening the app shows me the loading screen; after a few seconds, the UI shows up behind it, then the "Missing CH340 Driver" popup appears for ~100ms, and finally the application goes white (see Img. 3). wine logs show => render-process-gone { reason: 'crashed', exitCode: -36861 }

Online MBlock IDE fails to find the Bluetooth device, despite being connected

--- after successfully (?) connecting to the device via bluetooth, the online MBlock IDE continues to insist there are no devices available; additionally, a really weird 'help' text is listed along with it (see Img. 4).

image.png image.png
#

zooming in on the bullet points: this seems to be... counterintuitive, or nonsensical

image.png
#

in sum, there are two operation modes - Upload and Live

  • Upload: code written requires to be manually uploaded, classic arduino style
  • Live: code written runs on any of the live-mode specific events (anything that's not when mBot(mcore) starts up)
image.png
#

my best guess is they're saying Upload mode doesn't work on bluetooth connections, which makes sense - but then prompts the user to "update the firmware and try again"???

#

mBot 1/mBlock - Installation, execution and Bluetooth connection.

crisp pendant
#

@tight badge seems like mblock has a linux release. have you tried that yet

tight badge