Hello

thanks to Sandy and his awesome job, my polargraph is finished and works:
http://thebreizmaker.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/polargraph-tests/

Need to improve it with new motors, the right one ( from scraped printer ), is quite tough to rotate and I think it lose steps ( visible on the spiral picture )

May be I dont search efficiently, but is there anywhere a detailled help for the software, that describe all the functions ?

Is there a way to do a preview before printing ?

Don't succeed to use norvegian drawing. Is this function only possible with SD card? If I add a sd card to my device, could I get acces to these features ?

Thanks for your help

on the picture above, the paterns tend to be lower and lower from the beggining up/right to the end. Not as on on the image preview. and at the end, when I ask for a retrun to home, I was 2 centimeter under...

I'll by a adafruit sd breakout. I had a sd shield for ramps, quite sure it should be OK, but not sure of pin affectation...
thanks for your help

As always when debugging, in the controller, open the console (press ctrl-c) and look for the lines starting "incoming:". These are messages coming from the machine, and are _usually_ concerned with errors. Also try resetting the machine with that window open, and you'll see a full directory listing if your card is mounted correctly and working.

Naturally, if it doesn't work, fall back on getting it working with the adafruit SD examples to reassure yourself that your hardware _does_ actually work.

sn

WEll, that's a good sign. But again, try issuing the command to start the drawing, and watch what the machine's response is using the console. It'll usually tell you what the problem is.

sn

The program expects a greyscale image format.

The problem is that the file format is not strongly tied to the file extension, and PGM and PBM are used interchangeably, even though the contents can be different. P4 and P5 are the internal format of the files. P4 files are indexed-colour bitmaps. P5 are greyscale bitmaps. Polargraph understands P5 files, whatever the file extension.

In theory PBM is Portable BitMap, and PGM is Portable GreyMap. It is possible for PBM to contain greyscale information, but it is just as possible for a PBM to contain indexed colours, where all the colours are grey (so it looks the same).

http://www.polargraph.co.uk/2012/08/norwegian-pixel/:

Save your source image as a greyscale PBM or PGM file, and put it on the SD card. Note that GIMP saves PBM files as 2 colour dithered files, so you need to export as PGM to get it to work there. Photoshop just saves in whatever format the image happens to be in, so make sure you convert to grayscale (not RGB or indexed) before saving.

I have just committed a P5 PBM file to the controller github repo here:
https://github.com/euphy/polargraphcontroller/raw/master/data/gradient.pbm

sn

I'm fairly ashamed of the state of the documentation to be honest - it is no failing on your part.

Quote from kongorilla on March 24, 2014, 02:57
Time to wiki up this joint.

So good of you to offer 🙂

Ha, yeah right! Well you asked for it -

https://github.com/euphy/polargraph/wiki

I think I've added you as a collaborator. Anybody else who would like to contribute, please just ask. It is open, so anyone can go in and add stuff.

Do not be afraid to impose a structure, even if it is a skeleton. I will not have much time to add stuff for the next couple of weeks I think, but if there's something you think should be documented, but that you need me for, leave a placeholder, that way I know what to prioritise.

That goes for everybody. I can probably guess from the questions here what the things are that cause problems, but if I'm not moving fast enough then poke me directly - or raise an issue against the project in github (https://github.com/euphy/polargraph/issues) against the docs themselves. That's actually a good way of doing it. Do that to raise questions or issues.

Writing docs has never been onerous in itself, but I've never quite figured out the best place to put them. Lets try this.

ta!
sn

Counterfeit Kongorilla! Ok, I've just looked it up, and the wiki is open anyway, doesn't need a special designation.