That Simblee device looks very interesting and promising, and I am going to take a serious look into it. What about indoor range, like in a multi-story concrete building? If everyone had Andriods and were at various locations in the structure, would there be any connectivity problems?
I forget the details but the range is programmable. I want to get one but I know that it will only distract me... :-D
Glad you found it. Because I wanted to see it again Exceptional craftsmanship
The front end is what people see and interact with every day and it's all about perception. This is where you don't want to skimp which is why the user interface is so important. People are accustomed to high quality/resolution displays, today and anything less will be perceived as yesterday's thing.
You might consider the ShapeOKO3 controller board for your desk top plotter / CNC machining. It has a USB port, GRBL firmware, and 4 (24 VDC) stepper driver circuits all built-in and ready to go. I have their table top CNC, open source, machine and this controller is very solid and very reliable. Controller board price is $135
The link is HERE https://shop.carbide3d.com/products/carbide-motion-pcb?variant=16688468102
Hi Bruce,
some comment, perhaps helpful?
I totally agree, that it makes a lot of sense to reuse hardware and software. Some years ago I invested a lot of time to convert a small lathe into cnc. It was based on a notebook with DOS. After several years it broke down and I wondered how to replace it. Finally (after trying Sphinx for example), I came to the following solution. The idea is to cut the control into layers.
Raspi 2
Use Internet, file Server Access, useful programms like Editor
DosBox
utilities from the DOS-machine with output in HPGL
python program that can read some subset of HPGL, display graphics of the CNC-code and send commands to a Propeller board
Propeller Controller Board
Runs Tachyon Forth
rather simple very Basic machine control, just linear movements
Why use Propeller at the hardware frontend side? - powerful Multitasking easily possible. Flexible, additional Hardware can easily be added.
Why use forth? - It already has a protocol built in: You send a command via seral line and it will do something. It can easily give answers. Fast. Multitasking.
Why use HPGL? It is very simple compared to G-code. Some graphics programms can directly output HPGL.
Why use a small Linux System? Full blown file system and so on. Powerful, cheap, a lot of RAM. For an upgrade I would use odroid C2. But it would be possible to use a Windows notebook here.
An arduino will be at it's very limit, so changements will be difficult. You have to be completely sure, that the code fully supports your Needs, because it is difficult to modify it.
Best regards, Christof
I've looked at it before, and it's not trivial code. In order to make it work, and fast enough, they're essentially multi-tasking with interrupts. They use interrupts to drive the motor pulses, and there's a lot of hardware specific code in there for doing things like adjusting the timing of interrupts dynamically, setting specific pin/port masks, and so on.
The higher level code could likely be ported fairly trivially, but the low level bits are ugly and would require a fairly solid understanding of what they do on the Arduino hardware in order to port to the Prop.
I did not go over it too thoroughly, but at first glance, it appears that most of the ugly code is contained and limited to "stepper.c". However, I am sure that you probably spent more time looking at it than I did.
It looks easier to understand than Teacup did, but then again, I just took a cursory look.
Comments
I forget the details but the range is programmable. I want to get one but I know that it will only distract me... :-D
Glad you found it. Because I wanted to see it again
The front end is what people see and interact with every day and it's all about perception. This is where you don't want to skimp which is why the user interface is so important. People are accustomed to high quality/resolution displays, today and anything less will be perceived as yesterday's thing.
The link is HERE https://shop.carbide3d.com/products/carbide-motion-pcb?variant=16688468102
some comment, perhaps helpful?
I totally agree, that it makes a lot of sense to reuse hardware and software. Some years ago I invested a lot of time to convert a small lathe into cnc. It was based on a notebook with DOS. After several years it broke down and I wondered how to replace it. Finally (after trying Sphinx for example), I came to the following solution. The idea is to cut the control into layers.
Raspi 2
DosBox
Why use Propeller at the hardware frontend side? - powerful Multitasking easily possible. Flexible, additional Hardware can easily be added.
Why use forth? - It already has a protocol built in: You send a command via seral line and it will do something. It can easily give answers. Fast. Multitasking.
Why use HPGL? It is very simple compared to G-code. Some graphics programms can directly output HPGL.
Why use a small Linux System? Full blown file system and so on. Powerful, cheap, a lot of RAM. For an upgrade I would use odroid C2. But it would be possible to use a Windows notebook here.
An arduino will be at it's very limit, so changements will be difficult. You have to be completely sure, that the code fully supports your Needs, because it is difficult to modify it.
Best regards, Christof
I did not go over it too thoroughly, but at first glance, it appears that most of the ugly code is contained and limited to "stepper.c". However, I am sure that you probably spent more time looking at it than I did.
It looks easier to understand than Teacup did, but then again, I just took a cursory look.