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Author Topic: Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
supersambo
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Posts: 9
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Post Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
on: September 21, 2016, 12:15
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Hey,
first of all I would like to appreciate all the effort Sandy has put into this. It's truly a great example of an open source project!

I built a polargraph with an arduino uno and a motorshield v2. Actually I had a v1 shield at hand, which also worked but got incredible hot (mainly the shield itself but also the motors). After some hardware trouble shooting and a few failed drawing attempts I finally got it working. At least it seemed so, but suddenly after around 12 hours of drawing it stopped in the middle of nowhere :(. The controller software is still responding but but the arduino is busy.

Now I'm wondering if I can do anything to finish this drawing in one way or another. I suppose there is no way to get the arduino out of it's business at this point?
So I was thinking of
1. saving the queue
2. restarting the arduino which will release the motors and drop the gondel, given its current position (but I could clamp the pulleys down)
3. restarting the controller (just to be sure)
4. reload the previously saved queue
5. set pen position (by hand?)
6. continue

is this feasible or is there any other way to do this correctly? Specially the pen positioning step.
I was a bit surprised that I didn't find a similar issue in this forum. Maybe there is something wrong with my setup, which I should solve before trying to save this drawing?

Any help is welcome!
Image
sandy
Administrator
Posts: 1317
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sandy
Post Re: Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
on: September 21, 2016, 18:54
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Thanks for your message - good to hear you're "enjoying" the project anyway.

The reason why these aren't normally rescue-able is because you normally lose track of the queue position. In your case, I think you can rescue it using your steps _almost_.

The problem is that you can place the pen right to the right position, but the machine doesn't know where the pen tip is, or how thick the pen is.

You could do:

1) save the remains of the queue and take your pen out in case you accidentally scribble all over your scribbles.
2) restart the machine, and do the machine setup you'd normally do
- set home
- set pen width
3) place the pen at the home point
4) reload the queue and it'll pick up where it left off (use your hand to keep the pen off the paper while it moves to the start point)

The success of this relies on you placing the home point identically both times!

good luck

sn
supersambo
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Posts: 9
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Post Re: Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
on: September 21, 2016, 21:50
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Hi,
sandy thank your quick reply. I'm afraid I didn't manage to rescue this one. Hopefully the next time I will!
supersambo
Newbie
Posts: 9
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Post Re: Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
on: October 2, 2016, 10:34
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Hello again,
unfortunately, what I thought to be a one time issue has turned into a constant problem. I haven't been able to finish a single drawing yet because arduino stops working every time, which is very frustrating 🙁
I'm not even sure where to search for the problem since everything appears to be working. Here are are some further details on my setup. Maybe you can give me a hint what to try next:

- I'm working on a mac and was using the file you compiled for Linux which worked for me. When I realized the problems I compiled the polargraph myself for mac but this didn't have any effect.
- As mentioned above, I'm using an arduino uno and an Adafruit motorshield v2. Since changing settings to INTERLEAVE the motors work perfectly and do not get hot, nor does the shield itself
- As I sidenote, I'm using a relatively long usb cable of 5m length
- I'm powering the motorshield with 12V
- I'm pretty sure this was a coincidence, but it happened twice that the polargaph stopped working in the moment I shut off the light in the room.

Am I the only person to report this problem? Do you have any idea what could be causing this issue? Thanks for helping out.

Best,
stephan
EATYone
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Posts: 67
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Post Re: Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
on: October 3, 2016, 12:56
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i've tried during 3 days to find a good combo to work with an Adafruit V2... But failed, never find a really good solution... I know that this answer didn't match with ur question, but, when u know that it's really ok with a Ramps board + Mega, that you can find for 10 bucks, my advice for you, is to wait, buy thoses cards (Sandy haven't go polarshield for the moment) and you will enjoy drawing and stopping engeeniering your setup 😀
supersambo
Newbie
Posts: 9
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Post Re: Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
on: October 10, 2016, 14:47
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hi thanks for the suggestion I will think of it. In the meantime I managed to finish the drawing. The white stripes come from an empty pen.

I noticed that my desktop computer has some issues with the controller software and gets extremely slow and and also slows down the drawing process when "Show Queue Preview" and/or "Show Density Preview" is ticked! Deselecting those options made a huge difference!

sandy
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sandy
Post Re: Polargraph suddenly stops drawing
on: October 17, 2016, 21:13
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Yep, if you switch to the "queue" tab, things will run a lot easier.
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