I am reaching out because we have 150 limited first batch in-house production copies of the Blinks Sakura Strategy Pack arriving at households around the world (likely many of yours). It has been brought to our attention, that a number of the flashed devices did not receive the Gold Master firmware and have trouble being a good Blinks citizen (i.e. learn and teach others games).
While we are testing in-house, we could use your help to make sure we identify any issues with the game’s behavior before deploying a “patch” of sorts
The first thing y’all can do to help us out is to install the binaries for Trifoil and Bandits.
Install Bandits using the command line*: avrdude -p m168pb -P usb -c usbtiny -U flash:w:bandits.hex
Install Trifoil using the command line: avrdude -p m168pb -P usb -c usbtiny -U flash:w:trifoil.hex
*if you need a hand with this, there are a couple of posts in the forum for installing binaries
The issue reported is that Trifoil and Bandits fail to share their own game successfully (with high probability) and when present in a cluster, fail to share other games successfully, resulting in failed game loading. It looks like this. Note: the Bandits Blink in this video is the fail point, even though the video shows Hexenwood being loaded.
If these binaries uploaded to Blinks create any problems with game loading or otherwise, please let us know here in the comments.
EDIT: This could be me just not realizing where valid moves were based on the diagram in the instructions -
EDIT2: Thanks everyone! Yea my color blindless makes it hard to see the valid connection pip.
So, while the issue is fixed - The game has some issues - I played 3 games with my wife and (2 player game) and often she would win when I put a 3 down and she put a 2 down - Reproduced for a video.
Unless I don’t understand the rules that is! Hope the video helps.
In this case, I believe the game is behaving as expected, since the steal needs to happen in straight lines out from the center diamond… that said, it should signal that you are attached to an incorrect place so that you can place your steal in the correct location. The diagrams here show this straight out from the center formation… although once again, can more clearly call out correct vs. incorrect placement.
Hello L.C I can confirm what John Said, that behavior is expected the Second yellow was not in a valid placement, it should of had the connection point with a White blinking light to show it was valid. I can reproduce the behavior on a non updated blink game.
Hi, I think I’m having this exact problem with my Sakura set, though at first I chalked it up to dead batteries in some blinks. After changing a lot of batteries (probably unnecessarily so) the problem persists. I don’t have immediate access to my Dev kit, but when I get a chance to do so, should flashing the above binaries to their respective blinks do the trick to fix the problem? If I’m able to do it soon, I’ll report back.
I have re-flashed Both Trifoil and Bandits and corrected the issues, however I did kill the original Trifoil Blink in the process. so loaded it on to a blank that I had. Pro tip Use the sticker to block the battery contacts so you don’t fry your Blink with the programmer by mistake.
So this is a very interesting topic to me as I develop, fail, develop, get better, etc. etc. What would a patch in this ecosystem look like?
I can confirm that my Bandits and Trifoil blinks are exhibiting this behavior. Am I to understand that flashing these two hex files will correct them for those of us with a dev kit?
(I have not yet flashed them to a blank, I will do that as well)
The patch appears to be working. I reflashed the retail Blinks and they seem to be able to teach other Blinks, and do not interfere with the game sharing process.
On Mac OS I installed avrdude with brew (brew install avrdude) though I suspect specifying the path to the Arduino copy of avrdude would probably work too. (/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avrdude)
I tried putting my retail Trifoil and Bandits blinks into a regular program share group and they both came out with red flashes afterwards.
Just flashed them both with the .hex files shared on this post and they both now share their game without issues and receive games from a group without any problems
When trying to flash the .hex files from the command line I keep getting the error: AVR Part “m168pb” not found. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to resolve it? Thanks in advance!
I used m168 and the -F flag to override signature checking. Not the best idea, but we have well known hardware here so gave it a shot and my blanks and retail blinks came out fine.
Your other option is to edit the configs for avrdude to add the part. There are several tutorials to do that.
