Comments on: Extra guide stuff

By: DrawBot – Onwards and Upwards! | MakerBlock

DrawBot – Onwards and Upwards! | MakerBlock — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:58:21 +0000

[…] Robot Location. This is, in some senses, the flip side to robot portability. I’d love to put the ‘bot up on the wall and draw something really really huge. I don’t see that happening until I’m more comfortable running the robot, have found a better pen/paper combination, and – perhaps most importantly – figured out how to run the robot wirelessly or off an SD card. […]

By: sandy

sandy — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:13:19 +0000

Hey Bob, yep this was drawn from an SD card. The new mega code can go into “store mode” where it writes the commands into an SD card instead of acting on them, or you can just put them on a card directly in a txt file and draw from there. Initially, this is only for arduino mega, but I reckon it might squeeze into a simplified version on a regular uno.

By: Snyper Bob

Snyper Bob — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:56:47 +0000

This is awesome! I was wondering if it would be possible to run this via an SD card. That really opens up this machine to literally be it’s own art piece. If you are having a party at your place, load up a picture into the SD card, and have it draw it out all evening! Brilliant!

I have already received all my imported items from your side of the pond. The only thing I’m still waiting for is my sprockets and gondola that I am having Ponoko make up. They’ve been working on it for nearly two weeks now. I didn’t realize they took that long

Anyway, I hooked up everything I have, and loaded your older version of the code and I got the motors running! When I get some more time, I’ll work on getting the newest versions running and start thinking about how I’m going to mount everything to a drawing board.

Thanks for everything, and thanks for answering all my stupid questions last month. I’m hoping I will be up and running soon! Cheers 🙂

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:30:15 +0000

Thanks Sandy
I’ll give it a try.
Matt

By: sandy

sandy — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:00:41 +0000

Matt I’ve just updated both sets of code to help with this. I think it has something to do with trying to get a cord to be 0 length, or what happens after that. I have added checks that will stop the machine from trying to draw anything that isn’t actually inside the machine’s space. And on the controller side, I’ve changed the path extraction to discard all vector points that fall outside of the _page_. It makes sense to use the “select area” function to select the lines to draw, but that’s a bit tied up in the bitmap stuff at the moment so I haven’t yet.
No binaries yet, so please just get the code from the repo, and let me know how you get on!

By: sandy

sandy — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:57:30 +0000

Oh and forgot to mention – the other pixel types don’t work!

By: sandy

sandy — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:04:05 +0000

Scratching head here I’m afraid Matt. There is definitely scope for the firmware to get itself very confused about what it’s doing, with the C17 commands anyway. I’ve just had it spinning away endlessly here, telling me it was heading somewhere, but clearly not actually ever getting there. I have seen this firmware run out of memory before, while it’s going, and that exhibited the same behaviour, so it’s possible that’s the problem. I think it might be time to make a “reduced feature” firmware just for vector drawing.

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:26:45 +0000

I just tried some regular pics (non-vector) for it to draw and it too seemed to freeze also upon it starting to draw. So just FYI. I’m not sure if this was resulting from an update, but i’ll try it a few more times. I see you added some extra pix render options. I’m excited to give them a try when it gets going again. Have a good night.
Matt

By: matt.e.jenkins@gmail.com

matt.e.jenkins@gmail.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:59:19 +0000

Good news, Bad news. The issue you had with TSP is the same I had. I just moved the file out of “program files” and ta-da it worked. I set it up in Inkscape and loaded it in the Polargraph Controller. It started drawing and lasted about 3 short lines and seemed to pause. It just stopped and I wasn’t able to get it going again without shutting it down and restarting. But the same issue happed again. Upon reloading the program it would not connect to the arduino until I restarted the computer. Well I was close. Do you have an idea what I did wrong? Thanks
Matt

By: sandy

sandy — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:03:28 +0000

Good stuff Matt, glad it you got it working. I’ve added a page to the wiki about TSP at http://code.google.com/p/polargraph/wiki/TspVectorArtOnPolargraph but to be honest, there’s not much more to it than is on Dan Newman’s eggbot pages. The only thing I figured out was that it absolutely _wouldn’t_ work if you ran the python commands from the inkscape folder. At least on windows 7, since windows stops linkern.exe from writing to the program files/ folders. Which is a bit annoying. So what I needed to do was move the three python script files out into a non-program files folder and run the command line from there.

And don’t forget that in Windows 7 you can open a command prompt in a certain folder from explorer by holding down shift and right-clicking on the folder and you’ll see that there’s an option for “open command window here” on the context-sensitive menu.