Resources
When the robot will not cooperate
Organized by what is actually happening in front of you, not by which chapter it belongs to.
Being written
Troubleshooting guides are on the way
Eaglets is rebuilding its learning library from scratch. Every guide gets tested on a current kit and reviewed for accuracy before it goes up here, so this section fills in gradually rather than all at once.
Need something specific in the meantime? Ask us. We would rather send you the right thing directly than post something we have not checked.
The order worth checking
Almost every fault is one of three things: power, a connection, or code doing exactly what you wrote rather than what you meant. Work through them in that order. It is faster than starting with the most interesting theory, and the interesting theory is rarely the right one.
Two failures are worth knowing about in advance, because neither announces itself clearly. A weak battery does not look like a flat one. the wheel simply resists more in one direction than the other, which you can feel by hand before you reach for a meter. And if your computer cannot see the Pico at all, the usual cause is not the cable but the board shorting through the breadboard beneath it.
Error messages deserve more patience than they usually get. They generally state what is wrong on the first line and where it happened on the next. In Python, indentation groups lines the way brackets do elsewhere, so an inconsistent indent is a real syntax error rather than an untidy habit, and a tab followed by a space will fail even though it looks correct.