Well, it was going to happen sooner or later – I didn’t check the PCB design properly before sending it off to have it made, so the SD card doesn’t work on any of the batch of PCBs I’ve just received. OOPS.
Fortunately, the repair isn’t too much of a problem.
But that’s a bit embarrassing isn’t it. You know I’m the kind of person who lectures others about why it’s worth spending a little extra time checking things too.
So anyway, any Polarshield-based products you buy for the foreseeable future will have this ugly little hack on it. It’ll get neater over time, and have a bit of tape on top so should be robust. I’m publishing it here and have fixed the eagle PCB files for in the future.
Hi Sandy,
I have a question for ya. I recently needed my Arduino Uno from the Polargraph for another project so I put in a spare Arduino Mega in it’s place and it has the Adafruit Motor Shield. I though it should work. I updated the Arduino code too. On the first drawing since the change it seemed to be drawing well. Starting with curved lines filling in “white space”, but as soon as it gets to the “picture part” the machine freezes up and it scribbles a 1 mm line over and over never moving on from that one spot. I have tried a few times. Do you have an idea how I can fix it?
Thanks,
Matt
Hey Matt, is it using the same polargraph_server_a1 firmware? I didn’t think there would be any difference between using a mega and an uno – but maybe there is something subtle. Could it be that you haven’t uploaded the machine spec or set the pen width? Not really sure how that’d make much difference, but I can’t think of much else.
Hey Sandy,
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, it’s the same firmware and all specs are loaded in. Thanks anyways. I’ll give it a few more tries.
Matt J