Ah ... I've been kind of relying on nobody ever really doing a pull from the repo. I've been doing some work recently on merging the MEGA branch into the A1 branch, and making the mega features available through a unified firmware. Well, that's the theory anyway, I guess you've seen the reality of that...

The two new features you've probably seen:
- Set the microcontroller type (https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_a1/blob/master/polargraph_server_a1.ino#L39-L45)
- Set the motor driver type (https://github.com/euphy/polargraph_server_a1/blob/master/polargraph_server_a1.ino#L60-L74)

Then tidy up imports to match the motor drivers in configuration.ino (I guess you've done this, or you wouldn't get a compile).

I know one person has tested this, but that person isn't me.

Are the commands being accepted, or is it the comms bit that's broken?

sn

Good news on that front too, I've been wrangling with the controller to get it working in Processing 2 (now that I see Processing 3 on the horizon...). The way of doing separate applet windows has changed so there's a bit more work to do, but in principle I think it'll be easier to get support with a more modern version of Processing.

Ha! I had a quick look at changing the controller for Processing 2. And well... that's a fair amount of work for small but annoying tweaks. What where they thinking... ?!?!

Quote from ianc on April 19, 2015, 23:05
Hi Sandy,

Comms appears to be working ok. I'll do some more digging later this week.

BTW I've also been playing with getting the Controller to run on a PI 2. After a bit of faffing with Java serial libs I've got it running ok through Processing.

Ian

Did you manage to get it working with a Raspberry Pi 2? Impressive stuff! Any help with instructions/compilation would be really helpful.

Ah! I didn't think of changing the frame rate. I'll try that once I've got the motor shield working again.

Did you manage to get it working with a Raspberry Pi 2? Impressive stuff! Any help with instructions/compilation would be really helpful.

To get it going on the PI2, I grabbed the Java 1.7 sdk, Processing 1.5, and then the Polargraph controller source files and Libs. You then have to delete the Java install that comes with Processing, and then point it to the Java1.7 install instead - with a symbolic link (ln -s).

The tricky part is the Java serial coms library, as it doesn't work with the ARM processor on the PI. I did some digging, and there are various suggestions around, including copying other libraries in. I couldn't get that to work, so I cross-compiled an OpenWRT version I've been using on another project (it's a very long story).

Serial coms works now, but it's a bit flakey, probably because it's not playing nice with Debian. Some more time spent with Google will most likely find a proper solution for the coms library.

Now in hindsight, life is too short to be messing around like that, but I refused to let the poxy PI beat me 🙂

Welcome! It'd be best if you started a new thread to discuss this!

sn