Show all posts by user
Discuss here what makes your printer moving.
Re: Is this a dumb idea? - 16 years ago
Only recently active here, I have been using NC for over 30 years, and have owned my CNC for at least 15. Much has changed in the last 7 or 8 years relating to motor control. This was driven by the robot war competitions, which have become a popular school activity, replacing what had been the radio electronics club. A universal controller as you suggest would need to know what step rates eacby sheep - General
Re: RepRap future and leader (the need for) - 16 years ago
While I have become more active in the last few weeks I have been reading these forums for over a year. When I first joined, There was focus on the Reprap research foundation, which could do as you suggest. Take donations, pool resourced to make boards and part kits available. When the Darwin project achieved replication a few month after I started reading these pages, I noticed things hitby sheep - General
Re: Where is mendel BOM -- Open office is dead - 16 years ago
Thanks Sebastien; You really do keep order around here. It seems to help, find an answer when I stress some issue or other that is troublesome. This case was no different. The open office foundation came back up and I was able to find a version which would open the file. Open office may eventually adapt, At present this, like reprap is still much a dream with an alpha release pretending to bby sheep - General
Re: Where is mendel BOM -- Open office is dead - 16 years ago
Thanks again. This information is really helpful as I can check the rods and belts I have to see if they will work. Eventually cloud computing may take hold. There is something wrong with Mendel_assembly_data_sheet becouse I tried a few online translators such as google docs, and these give an error and simply say file can not be converted. I just checked and refreshed, I am still getting Coby sheep - General
Re: Gen3 electronics mod for Mendel - 16 years ago
Subtle difference. The ground fill and routing around the SD card is at issue. This should not affect the mod. Probably the film version was made with sangino routing. electrically they look the same. Basically what the mod is providing is power through the board. The ISP header is a convenient place to inject 5 volts from the USB cable. Some of the ATMEL tools such as the STK500 do this. Siby sheep - Controllers
Re: Where is mendel BOM -- Open office is dead - 16 years ago
Thanks, for the numbers. Now I need the rod lengths. The reason I am asking for this is that I am going through some of my spares looking for what may be usable. Sorry for the frustration, my experience is with firmware and obsolete operating systems. I really do have plans to Babbage's mechanical computer of the late 1830s. The link to open office is still dead. I have no way to open the aby sheep - General
Re: programming the Sanguino using the Decimilla as an ICSP. - 16 years ago
This thread on AVRFreaks with input from the maintainer of AVR dude has a clear description of the LIB USB drivers which conflict with the Jungo drivers. -julieby sheep - Controllers
Re: Where is mendel BOM -- This thread is dead - 16 years ago
I have spent the evening looking for the Mendel belt and 8mm rod lengths. The closest I can find, that might have this info is this open office document. The parts lister seems to only contain depreciated Darwin1.0 parts, nothing about the Mendel BOM. Why is there no PDF of the Mendel BOM!!??? I tried opening this with google docs but all that does is save the file name to a folder, when Iby sheep - General
Re: Some questions on the electronics??? - 16 years ago
My experience with steppers has been on my big (compared to reprap) leads crew based Desktop CNC. This has steppers the size of small coffee cans, These are rated at 3.5Amps. There is a network of resistors used for current limiting as the driver is over 20 years old. Eventually I would like to try micro stepping them. The best the old drivers can do is 1/2 step, which I may try this weekend.by sheep - Controllers
Re: Some questions on the electronics??? - 16 years ago
There are quite a few variations on the firmware. I think the makerbot versions do support the SD card and the RS485. I have been lashing up an ASM mega 16 version of the firmware that supports SD. Recently I went ahead and bought one of the blank makerbot motherboards as I already had a mega644. Implementing SD support on such a large chip is not difficult. I am pretty sure I saw FAT32 librby sheep - Controllers
Re: How to actually build a %%#&*$ mendel? - 16 years ago
James; Those are Nice videos. One detail. WD-40 contains a silicon carbide abrasive. WD-40 was designed for displacing water in frozen locks. It is not oil! On non moving parts WD-40 is great, as it displaces the water and keeps the parts from rusting. Think of WD-40 as liquid sandpaper. I repair clocks, WD-40 is the worst thing to use, Sure things run smooth, then the carbide particles bby sheep - General Mendel Topics
Re: Does anyone use AVR studio to program their chips? - 16 years ago
I have been using AVR studio for about 10 years. For this I have a dedicated windows machine. Now XP. On the host side I use Mac OSX. (I worked for apple in the 1990s) AVR Studio is a big monster. Over 100MB of download. For this reason I have not recommended it. Most of the users here tend to use linux. This pretty much limits the development to the well supported AVRDude. The maintainersby sheep - Controllers
Re: programming the Sanguino using the Decimilla as an ICSP. - 16 years ago
The mega644 needs a clock source to program it. Some of the megas have an internal rc occilator. If this fuse gets set off, and there is no crystal then you get the error noted. There are a lot of threads on avrfreaks,net forums. This issue comes up a lot. Getting the fuses set is a bit of an art. -julieby sheep - Controllers
Re: Just add stepper motors ... - 16 years ago
A good cheap lead screw, which I used on an EDM machine is the 40TPI threaded rod, which is used to hold lamps together. This makes for a fine pitch about 3/8 in diameter. The EDM I made from plans published by home and shop machinist, used a spring loaded half split nuts to control the backlash. The downside is that it is slow and the screw can not carry a great deal of load. -julieby sheep - General
Re: gen 4/5 electronics - 16 years ago
I just posted an ASM framework to GITHUB, (HIDAVRGcode) which indicates that most of what is needed for a hardware controller (hPod) will fit into a mega88. Or a series of mega88s. The direction this branch is taking, is more to move the controller core to a real time Linux kernel. Not unlike what EMC2 has evolved into. The advantage of using something like a PC103 is direct access to the inteby sheep - Next Wave Electronics Working Group
Another DIY repstrap analysis after one year observation - 16 years ago
Rather than clutter up some of the other threads with more off topic analysis, I decided to create yet another thread. I was amused by the CNC MILL wiki page. Is this sarcastic tone really the image that should be presented to interested parties? If so, I have more to add in the same spirit. I liked the comment of knocking up a Bridgeport to work as a repstrap controller in a week. While rby sheep - General
Re: Human Interface for firmware: Buttons and displays. - 16 years ago
I posted to GITHUB the initial lash-up of my code. The name of the project is HIDAVRGcode. The public user name is sheepdoll. This code was based on a project that started with a target cpu of AT90S8515, which is the same footprint as an 8051, but runs the AVR instructions. The code originally read floppy disks through DMA to an off chip sram buffer. The code still relies on software multiplyby sheep - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future
Re: Engraving PC boards. - 16 years ago
PC board engraving, only needs to take the lightest of cuts through the copper. AIRC about 30 or 40 microns. The trick why I think Mendle can do it is based on the pro machine I saw at a tradeshow. Most engravers depend on the Z axis and a flat PC board. By floating the head over the board the depth of the cut is fixed, just like when using a trim router. All the XY axis has to to is to moveby sheep - Controllers
Engraving PC boards. - 16 years ago
My 20 year old Desktop CNC, which I expect to use as a repstrap, was intended for use as a PC-board engraving machine. A watchmaker friend/mentor bought it at auction, then got tired of it and sold it to me some 10 or so years ago. I was the only one that could make it work. Engraving a PC board requires the opposite of the Gerber file. Gerber is a special case of G-code files, which are the sby sheep - Controllers
Re: Dumb Electronics Question - 16 years ago
There are in effect only 3 effective solutions to PC-CAM. Two of these are (low cost) commercial KCam4 and Mach3. EMC2 is the only public (linux) real time driver. The creators of Kcam and Mach (Kelly and Art) originally released these as shareware, Now the versions are crippleware with a trial period. Note that the above are all x86 processor is required, even on the linux based EMC2. None reby sheep - General
Re: Circular interpolation behavior - 16 years ago
Thanks, I was looking for that algorithm, which I have used in the past. I forgot the name. Interesting that none of my search terms found something so obvious. Now the trick would be to find the spline curve Y for every step on the X axis. A non trivial solution, as the curve can cross over itself, and make almost infinitely large loops. I will take another look at your spline curve blog entby sheep - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future
Re: Full mechanical Reprap - 16 years ago
In Strasbourg, there is a clock dating from the 1840s designed by Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué. Schwilgué.was an optimist and is one of my personal heroes. The calendar has digits to run through 9999. "After that one can place the number 1 before the other digits," the designer was reported to have said. But the real gem of this clock is a gear intended to measure the precession of the equinox, wby sheep - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Re: Circular interpolation behavior - 16 years ago
Triffid_Hunter - take a look at the code examples in the comp136 link in the root post. Not exactly integer, but could be done with fixed point. -julieby sheep - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future
Re: Full mechanical Reprap - 16 years ago
Quotefdavies Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You know, I believe that the earliest CNC machines > used paper tape to store commands and patterns. I > bet they did not have much computational brains, > either. > > fdavies I wrote an overview on the old paper tape systems recently in the firmware section. it is part of this thread Third post dowby sheep - Plastic Extruder Working Group
Circular interpolation behavior - 16 years ago
How do most reprap users expect G02 and G03 to behave? Most of the G-code I have written, for the old Dos program I have requires the use of G17,G18 or G19 to select which plane to draw the circle in. This program also does not allow the circle to cross quadrants. G90/91 also affect the I and J offsets. I took a look at the existing firmware, which implements these with floating point, root aby sheep - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future
Re: Project: FiveD on Arduino - 16 years ago
Regarding the empty lines, I was thinking in terms of code parsing. Most code languages treat eol chars as whitespace. Editors and interpreters do act where one gets attention by pressing the enter key, multiple times. -julieby sheep - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future
Re: Project: FiveD on Arduino - 16 years ago
BeagleFury Wrote: QuoteBeagleFury Wrote: > The only tricky one is CR LF; which is relatively > easy, just ignore the LF if preceded by a CR. Use a flag to represent eol. Set flag to ignore whitespace if either Cr or LF is seen, unset flag on next valid non whitespace char. -julieby sheep - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future
Re: Human Interface for firmware: Buttons and displays. - 16 years ago
I have been following that thread too. A bit undecided about that structure. Adding end-stops to the CNC and the layout of Mendel, to me make more sense routing a network cable. I like the idea of distributed processors. Yes standard Hitachi controller 2x40. I bought a case of these 7 or 8 years back. Not sure what you mean by keys. If you mean how many wires used on the larger AVRs,by sheep - Firmware - experimental, borrowed, and future
Re: Python will not run SyntaxError: future feature absolute_import is not defined - 16 years ago
Success! macports did install python2.6. I had to run it from the X11 term. Finally I got some dialogs. Some searching through the python docs and a few search terms located a page explaining the problem Is there a jog/feedback window, so interaction with my firmware can be tested?by sheep - Skeinforge
Re: Python will not run SyntaxError: future feature absolute_import is not defined - 16 years ago
Someone needs to update the wiki and blogs then. A check of macports indicates that on Tiger, the default 2.3 is installed, Leopard uses 2.5 as default. What a mess. That even though one has a UNIX core, to force the users to upgrade to more expensive hardware, just to sell it. Sorry for the MINI rant, but if reprap is to fulfill the vision of re-cycle/re-use and the accessibility to anyoneby sheep - Skeinforge