Hello!

I received my Polargraph SD kit recently and finally had time this weekend to put the things together. Everything went together smoothly. I measured out my machine (810mm wide, 1072 high), put this information into the controller, and uploaded it to the machine. The console said that it had received the information. Next, i set the home point, which was fine.

This is where it all went haywire, I tried the "move pen to point" function, and all that managed to do was move it a little bit lower, and to the left. Thinking this was a bit strange, I tried a few other points as well - I realised the drawing area was very small.

To test this, I loaded a SVG of a rectangle a bit smaller than my paper. The attached image is what it drew. As you can see, it's a bit trapezoid, and it is definitely way smaller than my actual paper (I've marked out the shape in red here, apologies for the blurry photograph).

I checked the power supply, and that seems to be working fine, in the right polarity, with the right tip. Changing this around did not help at all, so I'm at a loss as to what has happened. Really hoping someone can help me, and that it's just a newbie error somewhere!

Thanks in advance,

Jannette

Hi Sandy, thank you so much for the quick, intercontinental reply!

I have adjusted it and all seems to be working smoothly! Huge sigh of relief. I will leave a drawing running overnight and see how that goes.

Thanks so much again 🙂

Jannette

Hi Klaus, the details are on the setup pages here on the site - http://www.polargraph.co.uk/setup/polargraphsd-controller-application/ and the first match when googling "set up polargraphsd". That said - there is a lot of stuff out there and I should edit some of it!

sn

Hi Grayson, bad luck re studio, that sucks. I can see the artwork you are drawing states your feelings eloquently.

Right, inverted drawings. It usually means the cables have been swapped, either left to right, or the two pairs of wires that go to each motor have been swapped.

In your case, the whole thing is actually rotated 180 degrees which means there are two swaps (single swap would make it only back-to-front OR upside-down). So I think the directions of your motors are reversed, and the actual motors are reversed too. So you have your right hand motor plugged into the left-hand socket, and vice versa. And the sequence of wires in the connection is backwards too. Yours is a little different to most because you have the motors themselves mounted the opposite way. So you have them wired up correctly as if you were using the mounting plates that hold the motor with the shaft facing the wall, but because they have the shaft facing outwards, then all the movements must be reversed.

SO I would first try flipping the entire motor connection. If it is currently motorA-YWBR motorB-YWBR (yellow white blue red), rewire it to be motorB-RBWY motorA-RBWY. Remember to pull the power before unplugging the motors. If that doesn't work and a bit of it is still reversed, I usually try homing, then doing small moves with "move pen to point", strictly up and down, or left to right, and diagnose the problem that way. Think about what direction you would expect the sprockets to turn to move the gondola.

thanks!
sn

Ha ha! No problem!