I have a group of kids making switches using sensorboards. We've had a weird problem where a board will work for about five minutes, then no longer inputs register in the program. If we restart Scratch, then it works. This has happened with more than one board. Any ideas for us?
Karen
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Hi Karen,
Because you received Scratch Boards very early in the development process, there's a small chance that you ended up with some of the Scratch Sensor Boards that we used for testing in the run up to publishing our order form. That small set of Scratch Boards looked identical to the ones we ultimately shipped, but send sensor information in a slightly different (yet not completely incompatible with the new version(s) of Scratch) format than the Boards that are shipping now. I'll contact you via email to get replacements sent out if need be.
We only tried the firmware in question on a handful of Scratch Boards that look like the ones we ship. However, if other forum readers suspect that the 5-minute freeze Karen described is affecting a Scratch Board ordered during the summer of 2007, please email scratchboard at media dot mit dot edu.
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Karen,
I had much the same problem with my boards. Swapping the USB-Serial cable adaptor to a standard DB9 serial cable and using a standard serial port on my computer solved the problem. It's a cheap fix to try if yours weren't part of the 5-minute freeze described by millner. My post at http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2140 has a little more detail.
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