So you know I have that BB8 toy? Well whoever programmed it gave him a tendency for suicide.]I let it run out of batteries, but today I put it back on the charger. It has an inductive charger, so it can only juice up when it’s sitting on the pad the right way. In the spirit of giving him personality, they added this thing where if he’s out of batteries, or critically low I guess, when he’s on the charger, he droops his head forward dramatically like he’s powered down. Thing is, it doesn’t have a control for his head separate from the weight shifting that drives him around. Basically, in order to move his head, the entire internal mechanism has to rotate. This has the effect of lifting the inductive surface off of the charger, which prevents him charging further.
So I put him on the charger, he wakes up, rotates himself off the charger, and being without batteries, dies. Put him back -> wakes up -> kills self -> repeat.
I managed to prop up the charging surface so that he still ended up on it while being dramatic like he do, and managed to ride through his little animation long enough to get minimal power into the battery. It’s not an unsolvable problem, so I just think it’s funny. They also patch the firmware on occasion through the control app, so it’s possible that this is a bug that was solved already, but I haven’t powered my guy up in a while so he may be rolling with old code for the moment.