If you’re having a problem uploading a new game to your Arduboy, you may be encountering a bootloader issue. Some games use so much memory that your Arduboy’s bootloader cannot correctly enter into the mode needed to reprogram. Luckily, the Arduboy has a built-in function to prevent this from stopping you from installing another game. It’s called flashlight mode.
To use flashlight mode to install another game:
Turn off your Arduboy.
Hold UP on the D-Pad.
While still holding the D-Pad, turn on your Arduboy. You should see your Arduboy’s LED’s light up white.
Release the UP button.
Connect your Arduboy via USB and attempt to transfer the game, again.
Click the link below to see a video:
Games that can potentially require flashlight mode:
ArduboyLife
Arduventure
Arduboy Assistant
Note that flashlight mode may not be available in sketches that use their own custom libraries. It may have been removed to free up code space.
Team A.R.G. games don’t have it but they have a similar safe mode, which is activated by holding both the left button and the up button during power up. Safe mode doesn’t light the RGB LED. It just idles with a blank screen instead of starting the game.
Fortunately, it seems that so far all games that cause the upload problem that can be recovered using flashlight mode include it.
Maybe we should maintain a list of the games known to cause the problem, in this topic. For starters:
ArduboyLife
Arduventure
I was just in the middle of typing a response to note that!
To compensate for this problem, flashlight mode in my Arduboy2 library (and also slated for the next version of the Arduboy library) also turns all the display’s pixels on, so Arduboys with the reversed LED will still get an indication.
Not all games include “Flashlight” mode. Which game do you have loaded? If it’s either the Blob Attack or Mystic Balloon game that’s been factory loaded into the Arduboy, it doesn’t include the flashlight feature. (None of the Team A.R.G. games do.)
@Cody17, You really should spend some effort reading through the posts in a topic before blindly asking a question or commenting. The very first reply in this topic was specifically posted to point out that not all games include the flashlight feature, and indicated that this includes Team A.R.G. games.
It was indeed intended to add a flashlight/torch feature to the Arduboy and still is. That’s the purpose @Dreamer3 added it for, and why the function is named flashlight(). The ability to use it to recover when you can’t upload new sketches under some circumstances is just a useful side effect.
If it was intended just for upload recovery, the function would have been named something more appropriate and it probably wouldn’t turn the RGB LED full intensity white, which is annoying for the purpose of an indicator (and the LED doesn’t even turn on for units with the LED reversed).
Besides, long before flashlight mode was added, there was already a “safe mode” implemented specifically to address the upload problem. You hold the UP and LEFT buttons during bootup. However, it’s only enabled for the Dev KIt units because it was believed that the reset button could be used for the production Arduboys. Then, when it turned out that flashlight mode could be used for the purpose, there was no reason to enable “safe mode” for the production Arduboy.
