Now many of you have received your machines, and are bolding setting about destroying decorating your walls with them, I’ve made a couple of updates to the software guide, namely mentioning the extremely key point of how to get your machine size settings from the UI into the arduino itself. I’m positive I have written this somewhere already, but I can’t find it, so maybe I just imagined it:

Save machine size into hardware (IMPORTANT!)

The hardware (arduino) needs to know the size of the machine too, so once you’ve got your proper machine size into your properties file, and your processing controller running, go to F3-Details page and click both change machine buttons. This puts the machine values into EEPROM on the board, and it’ll be saved until next time.

from Polargraph Software Guide v2

I’ve chatted with a fair few of you on email and things, but I’d also like to remind anybody that there’s a forum on this site too, and it might be useful for other polargraphers to share the questions there.  That could be a good resource of information, particularly for new users.

Machine size is too big for your screen issue

Those bold fellows amongst us striving for very large machines (or those with very small screens) will have noticed that the UI doesn’t play nice with them.  The problem is that the machine size and image size is coupled directly to the pixel size on-screen.  So a 1800mm wide machine will be 1800 pixels wide onscreen, and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for much else.

I am working to decouple these things, and that should also make it a lot easier to zoom, and to resize the image to fit the page, that kind of thing.

Thanks for your feedback everyone, this is fun!