noticed tonight the 10 pin inter-board connector and the CPU itself had a lot of corrosion around the pins- its new/out of the box... cleaned it up, still has the funky upload problem, just wonder if perhaps that common upload issue might be related to poor cleaning/flux removal and resulting corrosion?
odd thing is, every other component on both boards look perfect- as if the processor and interconnect socket were mounted in a separate operation.
on the bullsh** robot upload problem, did get a new Arduino Uno today, kids are having a ball with it...probably loaded it 50 times, no problems. really cool little processor- too bad the 'official robot' has the loading issue and poor documentation of pinouts... coulda been a truly great educational tool.
plan on just tossing the upper board and putting the uno on it eventually...was a waste of money and time 