Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Updating Firmware on the Gogo Board V4

I have a bunch of Gogo Boards I've used for 4 years to teach creative making with robotics. Problem is mine are version 4.x and the developer, Arnan (Roger) Sipitakiat, has fully moved on to version 5.x. But there is a version 4.x setup that keeps my older boards working with Arnan's awesome blocks coding website, tinker.learninginventions.org. I'm writing this post to keep track of the pretty serious yak shaving necessary to keep them functional, probably only useful for my future fixes as only a small (Trump sized) handful of people ever used these boards. The Gogo Widget doesn't work to update the firmware on these older boards on a Mac, so I have to remove the Microchip PICs to reprogram the firmware. I have a Cana Kit UK1300 PIC programmer. But the software for writing the hex file to the PIC, PICkit 2, is PC only, so this tool is needed to write to the PICs on Mac. However, part of the instructions, adding two files to the root bin folder,
doesn't work when Mac is upgraded to El Capitan due to System Integrity Protection; copying into that directory is not permitted, even with sudo. So this post (answer by Chris Ostmo) explains how to disable SIP, make the copy, then enable it again.
To get the best firmware for the Gogo 4.x, go to the download page, go to the bottom, and open the older releases section. Download the version 112 for the Gogo 4.x.

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

hi, against all internet odds
im posting this comment.
my name is sheli im trying to get my hand on the old firmware of gogoboard v4
but my server feed me with "error 523". i.e the learningtinker.org is not reachable in my area. can you direct me to another source for the hex file

thanks sheli