good morning,
finally I got my polargraph running. it is a RAMPs 1.4 board with old spare parts of a 3d printer project; the belts are really not the best choice. the first question I have is if there is the possibility to make the whole machine a little bit quiter. the steppers are beeping after (or before) every comand pretty loud which is really anoying.

kind regards and happy drawing

thomas

good evening,
i am struggeling with the controller 🙁 render pixle works, but when i try something else (vector or trace) i always receives the error message: this point falls outside the area of the machine. skipping it. what am i doing wrong? is there something like a tutorial for the controller (not the one from instructables). right now I only can make black/white Pictures by Lifting the pen 🙁
cheers

thomas

hello and good evening,
things moving, not sure in which direction. but they are moving 🙂 i updated my "hardware" and i am pretty happy with the drawing Performance for a first mock up of the machine. my big Problem is to generate the path. i receive for example the message:

not possible to express any Detail.
max waves for pensize nan, grid: 360 is 1
rowsize in mm: 5.55, mmPerStep: 0.02, so rowsize in steps 360

the pen makes all the moves it should do, but does not create dark/bright areas.

many thanks in advance

thomas

OK...still room for improvement 🙂 current problem is that the left stepper sometimes make funny things and "looses" some steps (or make some too much). what I tried is to outline the area to correct all the size settings. but always on the right upper corner the left stepper suddently moves about 10mm in the wrong direction. after that everything gets bended and the home point is fare away from where it should be.

hopefully i can find some time this evening to investigate what is going wrong 🙂

findings until now:

- the belts work fine, just make sure you have these little swivel things in place
- use counterweights
- thing big, try something big first (big grid, big and simple picture and built a not to small machine)

thomas

Exactly that, the command wasn't parsed by whatever tried to parse it. Maybe one of the parameters was malformed, or there were the wrong number of parameters, or something like that. That's the generic answer.

sn

Hello, thank you! That's a neat looking setup too - those concealed motor mounts are very nice indeed. I'm not really sure what to suggest with your beeping. I can only guess that there's some interference between the communications port that's used to send messages back to the controller, and the left-hand motor channel.

Now I couldn't figure out why only those two motor channels worked anyway, and I wouldn't be surprised if the LCD or touchscreen stuff is using the other pins in some peculiar way. To look into this, check the RAMPS pin assignments (https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/blob/Development/Marlin/pins_RAMPS_13.h#L20-L52) and do some experimenting with the AccelStepper declarations (https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_polarshield/blob/master/configuration.ino#L71-L81) and see if you have any better luck with getting them working than I did.

Next steps would be to strip out the LCD references entirely:

https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_polarshield/blob/master/configuration.ino#L141-L148
https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_polarshield/blob/master/configuration.ino#L162
https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_polarshield/blob/master/lcd.ino#L547-L548
https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_polarshield/blob/master/lcd.ino#L590-L604
https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_polarshield/blob/master/polargraph_server_polarshield.ino#L379
https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_polarshield/blob/master/polargraph_server_polarshield.ino#L384

at least. There's no harm in stripping out any reference to LCD, SD and touch, UTouch, UTFT and dumping the entire lcd.ino file.

Oh I replied to your earlier email last week, but the answer is yes, just buy through the shop - add a note on the order to remind me about any special requirements (eg the LCD screen) in case I forget or don't recognise the order as being attached to a previous conversation.

I've just been in the studio over the weekend, so I have plenty stock again right now.

cheers!
sn

Hi thomas
this is great, good job !
I love the love rendering.
Strange things about the 2 lines misaligned, I have the same issue at home and it was with the weight at the end of the beaded cords, they together hit the edge of the drawing area and the beaded cord jump a step on the push-fit sprockets. I solve this by testing manually test the all drawing area and adjust the weight position.
I am currently thinking on create some small guide for the beaded cords

Hope it can help
Denis

Hello, looking good there. Do you mean the polarshield is rough, or the RAMPS is rough?

Remember you can use the screw adjusters on the motor drivers to control the current that is sent to the stepper motors. Clockwise sends more, anticlockwise sends less. These drivers are adjusted for the motors I ship my machines with, so they will not be correct for your machine. Adjust them the exact same way you adjusted your drivers on RAMPS in the past.

sn

good afternoon,
not much Progress with my polargraph, but trying every free minute to create some kind of art 🙂 I downloaded inkscape, GIMP and StippleGen and tried to get familiar with the programs. first real output is a 5 colour Picture with a lot of room for improvement. but i like it. i choosed variable frequenca and not solid size and started with black. maybe it would make more sence to start with the brigthest colour.

thomas

grid 60
pen size 0,6; edding 1200
paper size DIN A3 (420x300)