George Frick

What you see below is the result of my first attempt at building a robot. The goal was to build something Arduino based. It would move forward, turn around, come back; and then turn around again to be in its original position. Finally, I wanted to try multiple part selling web sites, to get experience with who to buy from. Fortunately; they were all better than expected experiences. My Arduino was a Christmas present; but I will be factoring 32.00 into the cost of the project to account for it. The first phase was an order from SuperDroidRobots.com. Tank treads, a double motored gear box, and some plastic to build a chassis came in at $40.00. The second order was from Adafruit.com, for a continuous rotation servo and an Arduino Motor Shield. The Adafruit order also came in at $40.00. Subtracting the cost of the unused Servo, this robot is built for just under $100.00. You can see the initial parts order below. I started by building the motor shield, this is the motor shield kit wh...

First, here is the player we are discussing, or at least your average version: Although if you are here, you probably don't see the nice shiny interface above. That's a shame, but we'll try to fix it. This all started for me when a friend got a bag of crap from Woot! Among the loot, were quite a few dead Sansa e2XX players. You have to use the e200 tool to reflash them, it works better under Linux, and I run Linux (Ubuntu if you must know). So I ended up in a deal where I would try to fix all three. They were all fixed, and below I share how I eventually got all three working. There are many posts on the web about how to fix these. They involve going into factory mode and flashing the firmware. Unfortunately a measurable percentage of people find that to be completely useless because if you can't get the device into factory mode then you can't update the firmware. Let's troubleshoot a Sansa MP3 e2XX player. Keep following these steps, if you make it to t...