Comments on: Polargraph Controller v1.1.7

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 05:06:13 +0000

I had the same problem – not sure what my version was before, but uploading with whatever bootloader’s included with Arduino 1.0.4 fixed it.

By: sandy

sandy — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 21:14:34 +0000

Very good to hear Matt, thanks for letting me know. Wonder how many of these UNOs this will crop up on?

By: Matt J

Matt J — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 16:49:38 +0000

Works Great. I made a parallel programmer (cheap and easy) and used it to burn a the latest bootloader on my Arduino UNO (original). Once I did that I was able to load your latest sketch and it works well with the newest Processing program.
Thanks,
Matt

By: sandy

sandy — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:47:41 +0000

I know what you mean about the scribble pixel – my most pleasing results with scribble where when it was set to expand a couple of steps after every line. The pixel boundaries totally disappeared, but there was also a big loss of detail in the image. Didn’t matter in my case, but it kind of needed tuning for each image. I think the scribble pixel already does have a slight increase in boundary, the size is multiplied by 1.1 or something like that.

By: sandy

sandy — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:44:11 +0000

Cool Matt, can you let me know if you have any luck with it please?

By: Matt J

Matt J — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 17:47:01 +0000

I’ll try a new bootloader. Thanks.
Matt

By: sandy

sandy — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 07:53:31 +0000

Matt, I wonder if that’s the same issue as we’re discussing here in the forum: http://www.polargraph.co.uk/forum/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=71.0 I haven’t had the problem myself, so I can’t confirm if a new bootloader fixes it – but there is a known problem with sketches that are bigger than 28K.

By: Matt J

Matt J — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 04:53:05 +0000

Hi Sandy,
I have my first paying customer for a drawing, but I can’t seem to get my machine working. It’s been a while since I updated my arduino and processing code so i downloaded your latest updates. The Arduino sketch compiled nicely but it wouldn’t load into the Arduino. I was getting the error

avrdude: stk500_paged_write(): (a) protocol error, expect=0x14,
resp=0x64
avrdude: stk500_cmd(): programmer is out of sync

I have the newest Arduino 1.0.1. and am trying to upload to an UNO. Do you have an idea what I can do to fix it? With a slightly older sketch that will upload, the Polargraph program says the UNO is connected but the motors never spin or activate. I have tried to use your older code and now I can’t get any of it to work right. Can you point me in the right direction? I hope this gibberish makes since. I would love to get this working again. Thank you for your time.
Matt

By: kongorilla

kongorilla — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 22:22:56 +0000

I woke up this morning with one of those “Hey, wait a minute…” feelings. I realized that the “Scale Pixel” feature is what I’ve always wanted to make the “scribble” style more useful. Previously, since the scribbles were confined to their “pixel” boundaries, the grid was always too obvious. Now that the scribbles can be drawn “outside of the lines”, the drawing comes out looking more random, as you’d want a scribbled drawing to look.

I couldn’t resist testing this out, other responsibilities be damned, and it looks very good. There was another discovery today, btw, since summer has hit my workroom hard: BIC ballpoint ink flows much more freely at 90°F — and I should buy a fan for the motor drivers.

By: sandy

sandy — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 11:59:06 +0000

Pesky work/life, always getting in the way of .. er.. whatever this is. The pixel scaling might be useful with your layered drawings Kong, but the queue crash fix and the performance boost is the real win in this update. Can work with much longer queues than previously, before it starts slowing down. And turning off the queue preview even eliminates that.