Has anyone made a Spherebot/Eggbot?

I wish I had seen this thread before I built my spherebot. Anyway, for anyone interested in making one with Arduino and Adafruit motor shield, I ended up having to do some major surgery on zaggo's firmware to get it to work.
Printable files here, with BOM: [www.thingiverse.com]
Modified firmware here: [github.com]
Firmware has been rewritten to use Bresenham line algorithm to coordinate the steppers. Made stepper moves blocking because Timer1 is used by the Servo library. Ruby gcode-sender file included which works (comments and blank lines must be removed as it expects to see an "ok" after every line) and "M01" is trapped for pen changes. "M300 S255" is trapped in the firmware and just lifts the pen.

Cool I have one of these Adafruit Motor Shields laying around here for years now.
I just wanted to compile your firmware when I got compile errors.

The Adafruit Motor Shield Library does not contain the files you include in your sketch.
You included

Wire.h
Adafruit_MotorShield.h
"utility/Adafruit_PWMServoDriver.h"


But the library only contains:

AFMotor.cpp
AFMotor.h

along with some example files.

I just searched for the .h files and found that there is a V2 of Adafruits Motor shield library : [github.com]

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/2015 04:59AM by ianmcmill.

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Success !!! After 12 hours of messing around I have managed to get my spherebot accept commands.
I have tried several firmwares, different driver modules (A4988 / DRV8825), USB cables, power supplies. Nothing worked. The servo and the steppers work with the examples sketches.

My solution:


I used thunderbug1's firmware. IMHO this is the most mature firmware available. [github.com]

I setup the pins according to my breadboard configuration and made one little change to the baudrate at the beginning. I used 115200 baud. I am on a mac, need to verify this on a PC but now I can order commands and the motors move.
Note: G-Code commands are case sensitive. G1 X100 = ok; g1 x100 = bad.

//#define BAUDRATE 9600
//#define BAUDRATE 57600
#define BAUDRATE 115200
//#define BAUDRATE 256000

Now here comes the next problem. On my mac I use SphereBotSender and I get Errors on random lines of a gcode file. Most of the time betwwen line 1 and 150.
thunderbug1 recommended just to continues the print but the SphereBotSender won't let me. I can only start over again. He also said he wrote a watchdog that should prevent such things from happening but this was only a workaround and as this issue has been fixed he removed the watchdog. Any ideas which gcode sender also works ?
How about this feeder.py ?


EDIT - Test on Windows 10 machine:
I have tested this on my Windows 10 machine. What worked on the Mac does not work anymore on my PC. With the serial monitor from the Arduino IDE I get the "Spherebot 2.1" string. The pen stepper moves upon opening the serial monitor aroung 10° to the right then stops. Commands are ignored.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/2015 08:30AM by ianmcmill.

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Blog: Capotexl
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I've been using the gcode sender script I wrote (in the utils directory of my firmware). It does a few things I found necessary, like stripping blank lines and comments. If you send a blank line or comment only line and the sender is expecting an "ok" before continuing, it will hang.

I am getting some errors when trying to run your script. But for some really strange reasons the Spherebot UI posted here work: [www.open-electronics.org]

If I try the latest version from thunderbug1's github, it does not work.

Now I have to figure out how to configure inkscape and its unicorn export settings to draw on a table tennis ball. Are there any things I have to consider or is there a specific for the spherebot modified unicorn*.py ?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/2015 10:47AM by ianmcmill.

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Blog: Capotexl
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I got it working with Eggduino. Really cool firmware. Works like a charm. Just two little modifications in eggbot.py and in eggbot_scanwin32.py and you can control the spherebot/eggbot/eggduino directly from within Inkscape.
I described the changes to be made here. Also read the readme from the developer for the other change in eggbot.py.

These modifactions are only needed for Windows computers. Mac's find the Eggduino without modification.

I still need to calibrate stuff and find out how to mount the egg but it works now. Also the pen arm could need some modifications so it is less jittery.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/17/2015 04:22PM by ianmcmill.

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Blog: Capotexl
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