Looks good Nik, but to be honest, for $35 it's hard to see why we'd be using an arduino at all and not just control the stepper drivers directly from the raspberry pi, and just remote desktop in (or whatever) to control it. Attach a little keyboard / control surface and you've got all the real time control, a camera for real time drawing. Could be cracking. I looked briefly into beagle boards but I thought they were still pretty pricey for playing with.

I do have a version of the code I'm testing on an arduino mega with an SD card slot, and that'll (eventually) allow for untethered drawing, but a mega+SDcard shield costs more than $35 already so I'm tempted to put that on hold and make the next version completely embedded, including the interface.

Will be keen to see where this goes.
Sandy Noble

Ah yes you're probably right, I guess a parallel output would be needed. A custom board is the next step though, I'm planning something that is arduino compatible via USB, able to drive two steppers, and have a bit of on-board memory (probably an SD card slot), so it can either cache a pictures-worth of pixels, or just hold the picture itself and interpret it on-the-fly. Either ATMEGA328 or 644 based. Might be nice to have a bit more memory.

Would like it to have a couple of pins spare so it isn't just a single purpose board, and there's some room for sensors / endstops, but it all depends on cost.

sn

Thats weird, I've been using Processing 2 on my mac and it works fine with the controller app, I do recall having to trouble shoot the hell out of it but I got it working. I'll do a check on the file structure in the pi later this week and report back. If I get this working I'll give instructions in the forum.

🙂

selectOutput() with no params is a valid Processing 1.5 library method call, the [url=http://www.processing.org/reference/selectOutput_.html]v2 version of selectOutput[/link] does indeed have two parameters, so I suppose that's why it's complaining about it.

I think you would have had more than just troubleshooting to port to v2: big bits of it need rewritten - anything that uses sub-windows or radio buttons for instance - and that's more or less why I haven't done it myself. I think it needs a more radical rework than just a couple of tweaks to get the current code to work.

OTOH I could be wrong and would _love_ to find I was just being a dunce and there was a dead easy way to do it (please!).

One other thing - there should be 14 files loaded in the project.

sn

The line cause ing trouble states:

Radio r = cp5.addRadio("radio_serialPort",10,10);

Ok cool, Im now posting this from the raspberryPi that I'm working on.

So I got the elder version of IP5 and it looks like it wants to work so badly. The error message I'm getting now says:

Error inside Serial.ports()

at the line:
String[] serialPorts = Serial.list();

Below is the info box text that propagates:

Display 0 does not exist, using the default display instead.
Running polargraph controller
Exception setting up logger: null
Successfully loaded properties file /home/pi/sketchbook/PolarPi/source/polargraphcontroller/default.properties.txt
machine size: 5002.0, 1996
windowHeight:362
Finished loading configuration from properties file.
ControlP5 0.5.4 infos, comments, questions at http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/controlP5
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/pi/processing-1.5.1/modes/java/libraries/serial/library/linux32/librxtxSerial.so: /home/pi/processing-1.5.1/modes/java/libraries/serial/library/linux32/librxtxSerial.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (Possible cause: can't load IA 32-bit .so on a ARM-bit platform) thrown while loading gnu.io.RXTXCommDriver
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/pi/processing-1.5.1/modes/java/libraries/serial/library/linux32/librxtxSerial.so: /home/pi/processing-1.5.1/modes/java/libraries/serial/library/linux32/librxtxSerial.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (Possible cause: can't load IA 32-bit .so on a ARM-bit platform)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary1(ClassLoader.java:1957)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1882)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1872)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:849)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1087)
at gnu.io.CommPortIdentifier.<clinit>(CommPortIdentifier.java:123)
at processing.serial.Serial.list(Unknown Source)
at polargraphcontroller.setup(polargraphcontroller.java:568)
at processing.core.PApplet.handleDraw(Unknown Source)
at processing.core.PApplet.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:724)
Exception in thread "Animation Thread" java.lang.RuntimeException: Error inside Serial.ports()
at processing.serial.Serial.errorMessage(Unknown Source)
at processing.serial.Serial.list(Unknown Source)
at polargraphcontroller.setup(polargraphcontroller.java:568)
at processing.core.PApplet.handleDraw(Unknown Source)
at processing.core.PApplet.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:724)

I think I'd investigate other projects that have successfully ported processing 1.x to rasppi - I think it is not straightforward. You could always port it to v2 if you liked 🙂

sn