Faulty Bee Bot Junior School educational robot

[Clive Carrington]

Been asked to fix some faulty Bee Bots by my local Junior School. These are simple programmable robots from here:

TTS Bee-Bot Programmable Floor Robot Single

A perfect starting point for teaching control, directional language and programming.

www.tts-group.co.uk

The Bee Bot is programmed with a series of commands by pressing buttons for Forward, Backwards, Turn Left, Turn Right and then pressing the execute button. The battery is well charged and I've tried swapping with a known working Bee Bot. Three of these Bots will only run through three commands before resetting itself. I've tried running them lifted up so that there is no movement and it still stops after about 8s. Not sure this is, therefore, a poor connection.

I've found this unofficial service manual, but this fault condition is not covered.

TTS Bee-Bot Unofficial Service Manual

The TTS Bee-Bot Programmable Floor Robot is an educational desktop robot geared towards teaching children simple programming concepts. The robot replays a sequence of movement steps (Forward, Back, Turn Left 90°, Turn Right 90°) which are programmed using buttons on its back. The robot provides...

hackaday.io

Has anyone else tried to fix one of these? Any ideas welcome.

 

[danadak]

You might check the two electrolytic caps, are they bulging at all ? Thats
a sign they are failing.

I noticed in manual the soldering on the boards looks pretty crappy, you might
inspect with a magnifying glass for any poor connection.

These 4 connections in manual, notice how lower right lead seems not to have
solder wicked fully around it......

These do not look great either :

Google "good solder pcb connections" and look at images found in your browser.
PCB Flux helps a lot.

Regards, Dana.

 

[ahsrabrifat]

Measure the battery voltage under load. If it drops significantly, the Bee-Bot may be resetting due to a low-power condition. Clean the battery terminals and contacts inside the Bee-Bot.