CPE+Crickit - motor rotation

[rpeteranderl]

My students are building a robot with CPE as the brains and Crickit as a driver for two hobby motors at 5V. The programming is done in Makecode with blocks. The task is to have the robot move forward, and then under certain conditions spin in place to change directions. They use the Neopixels to monitor the state of the program.
A group is using the "cricket tank motors (-50%) (50%) command, but the motors keep spinning in the same (+) direction. LEDs indicate that the robot is in the spin state, and in other steps of the program the motors did run backwards as expected. Any ideas what might be going on? -- Thanks for any help

[Franklin97355]

Not using Makecode I don't know if it is possible to post your code but it would help if you can.

[adafruit_support_bill]

Do you have one of your motors set to 'invert' the rotation direction?

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cri ... ed-2989460

[rpeteranderl]

Do you have one of your motors set to 'invert' the rotation direction?

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cri ... ed-2989460

Thanks for the suggestion. No, we haven't tried that yet. I thought that block was mainly to make up for hardware confusion when the wiring went wrong. I'll pass it on, and we'll see what comes of it

[rpeteranderl]

Not using Makecode I don't know if it is possible to post your code but it would help if you can.

Here's the screenshot with the code. The bit in question is after the LEDs at 2 and 7 are turned red and green

[adafruit_support_bill]

What do the motors do when both lights are green?

[rpeteranderl]

screenshot of make code blocks

robotcode.png (101.63 KiB) Viewed 602 times

screenshot of make code blocks

robotcode.png (101.63 KiB) Viewed 602 times

screenshot of make code blocks

robotcode.png (101.63 KiB) Viewed 602 times

screenshot of make code blocks

robotcode.png (101.63 KiB) Viewed 602 times

Do you have one of your motors set to 'invert' the rotation direction?

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cri ... ed-2989460

Sorry for the follow-up, but here is a screen shot of the program from my student. (-100, -100) and (100, 100) do what is expected, but the (-100,100) keeps going straight with both wheels going forward instead of turning. Do you have any idea what went wrong? We are going to try Motor 1 (-100%), Motor 2 (100%) in separate commands tomorrow, as well as Motor 1 (0%), Motor 2 (100%). Do you have any other suggestions?

[adafruit_support_bill]

What do the motors do when both lights are green?

[rpeteranderl]

What do the motors do when both lights are green?

They move both in the same direction, as intended

[adafruit_support_bill]

I'll have one of our MakeCode experts take a look.

[rpeteranderl]

I'll have one of our MakeCode experts take a look.

Thanks so much! In my next class with that team today I will have a look at the Java version of their program to see if anything sticks out to me (although I know next to nothing about Java...)

[adafruit2]

ok lets try just a simple app with a single block so we can be sure that we're testing just one thing. in case the 100-ness is causing an issue, can you try just setting the motors to +50/-50?