This week I am programming the motors. We have decided to go with Gestalt. From Ilan Ellison Moyer´s Master's thesis "Gestalt is an accessible and flexible control framework which aims to augment the ability of individuals to create new automated tools, and to thus self-extend their abilities to create objects which would be too tedious or impossible to create by hand." A good place that helps to get started is this tutorial from fabacademy
To Do
- Prepare the environment for using Gestalt nodes
- First test
- Do the programming and testing
The "Doing"
Programming environment
Preparing and testing
Physical layer is called Fabnet, "a multi-drop network, meaning that multiple modules (a.k.a. nodes) share a single set of communication wires. Signalling is differential based on the RS-485 specification." It is implemented with an RS485 bus. A bridge between it and fabnet is needed. Luckily, there was already a board prepared from last year. So I prepared the setting to test first just one motor:
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single_node.py
example. I just had to change the portName
at the def initInterfaces(self)
of the virtualmachine
with my COM port number which was COM13 most of the timesAt first it was not working. I checked, double checked, triple checked I had downloaded all the code needed and that I had the pins correctly connected. Nothing. I was almost sure it should be a connection, but not idea where. I could not get the blue led tinkle. I was very frustrated because it everything seemed to be very straightforward, but I got stuck in this point. Finally, another eyes (Jari) spotted the incorrect connection. And it worked as expected: blue led started tinkling, I pressed the buttonon the node to set it as the axis and it moved!
Programming the motors
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xy_plotter.py
example.
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First demo with motors
Fruit Peeler Team from Marta on Vimeo.
Resources
- Gestalt nodes and software
- this tutorial from fabacademy
- Corresponding assignment from Yrjö
Once done
Summary
- I have programmed the gestalt nodes
- I have done documentation on the page and organized the layout
- I have participated in testing different solutions for the blades
- I have participated in testing different solutions for holding the fruit
Difficulties
- Main difficulty was a small but time consuming one: find the wrong cable when the gestalt motors were not working at first
Files
- python code for the machine adapted from example xy_plotter.py