There’s been a bit of ongoing investigation about getting the polargraph firmware running with the new Adafruit Motorshield (v2). I have just got one of these shields recently, so have only just had a chance to work on it tonight.
https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_a1
The new Adafruit library is slightly bigger than the old one, and the polargraph_server_a1 firmware was super tight on space already, so I’ve split up the code into a set of features that can be easily enabled or disabled at compile time to save space:
- PIXEL_DRAWING – This is pixel shading.
- PENLIFT – Controlling a servo to lift the pen.
- VECTOR_LINES – Drawing straight lines, aka vector plotting.
So to get this to fit on, you need to disable either PIXEL_DRAWING or VECTOR_LINES – can’t have both anymore, not with Motorshield v2.
For convenience, I’ve pre-compiled two binaries, one for Motorshield v1 (using AFMotor), and the other for Motorshield v2 (using Adafruit_MotorShield). The firmware for Motorshield v2 has pixel drawing disabled.
This is a bit of a pain, but I don’t see an acceptable alternative.
I haven’t tried this for actual drawing yet, because I haven’t got a machine made up that uses this system, but at least the motors move! Please let me know if there is any success – or otherwise.
Happy scribbling!
This knowledge transferred to: https://github.com/euphy/polargraph/wiki/Polargraph-Server-for-Adafruit-Motorshield-v2