Yarbo has been working well for a while now. We’ve got a lot of snow lately. It was out working yesterday with no apperant problems. Got up this morning to more snow so tried to send yarbo out. No connection. Found it parked a meter away from the charging pad, dead as a door nail. I’ve had it plugged in using the corded charger for half an hour now, no response.
I think my mistake was that I told someone last night how well yarbo was working. The yarbo karma gods heard me.
Any suggestions?
If it was me, I’d start with disconnecting the battery for a few minutes. Let’s completely reboot everything to rule out a software glitch. Then reconnect the battery and see if you can power Yarbo back on. If not, I’d then try the corded charger again for an hour or two then try to power it on again.
If you have the necessary equipment, you could monitor the electrical current of the corded charger to verify that it is actually charging the battery once connected.
Hopefully your Yarbo will be back up and running in no time.
The unplug the battery thing seems to have brought it back. Thanks dude.
Any thoughts on what may have caused this failure?
I didn’t see this happen last year, but this year I am seeing Yarbo getting high-centered on packed snow. Yarbo will sit and spin its tracks without throwing a notification to you that it’s not moving. It may say something on the map like “altering path because of uneven terrain” or similar, but it will keep trying to move indefinitely from what I’ve seen, auger running as well. That’ll drain the battery.
Note that I’m my own worst enemy on this one: I removed the studs from the snow tracks. Those should help in this situation. We have had easily packed snow the last couple of storms, causing the rover to ride its belly and build up packed snow underneath 'til the tracks spin. Rescue required, even if Yarbo didn’t toss you a notification.
Anyway, it’s possible your rover sat and spun trying to return to the Docking Station. Did you notice small piles of snow in front of and/or behind the tracks? Did it have a pile of snow under the bottom of the machine that could have lifted it up just enough?
I’m in the habit of checking on Yarbo while it’s working and making sure it’s charging when it should be. Unfortunately it’s no longer enough to listen for the Yarbo, as the auger continues to spin when the tracks are churning, and it sounds like the unit is doing work.
Hey. Not a problem. Glad it worked!!
I haven’t seen your exact issue before, but there have been other weird Yarbo things that point to maybe a memory leak or other system instability that were resolved by a simple ‘hard reboot’ of the system.
Out of curiosity, after Yarbo came back to life, what was the battery level?
It wasn’t high centred or anything like that. It had just cleared the area found it in. It looked like it was about to do the charging pad clearing pass and just stopped.
12%, likely from being plugged in for 45 mins or so. It seems like it just stopped and sat there until the battery died.
Yep. That’s what it sounds like.
This is another example of why we need a more robust notification system with Yarbo. If it’s sitting there not on the dock with the battery draining, you should be getting A SERIES of alerts on your phone to warn you about it.