26/6/2015 // Mechanical & Machine Design //

Planning

When we learned about this assignment we all set together and discussed ideas as to what this machine will do and how we want it to behave. We thought about the useless machine and made it our inspuration.



We decided to make a drawing machine and something to bother it.
Basically, we wanted to make owr oun useless drawing machine.


Making



We made a two axis structure using the kit we got. The first base axis was made with the original files and for the second axis we modified the original file and made mounting holes for combining the two axis into one structure.



Using the laser machine we cut a wheel from a 4mm wood that fits in a standard bearing and attached it to the end of the upper axis.




Programming

We started out with using the gestalt and programming it form the new tutorial and also used this tutorial as reference.
Programming the gestalt proved to be a challenging task since there is no user interface and all is done from the terminal. We followed the instructions and installed PySerial and the gestalt github code from here.

After that we connected the the board and the AVRISP programmer and started the first step which is initializing the x and y nodes.



The connections were good but something in the process didn't work, we kept getting:

"XAxis: Could not reach virtual node..."



Roy asked around in the mailing list and noticed that many people got the same problem. After rechecking the connections, cable, code, libraries ect, we decided to use a motor driver instead. So we can see the machine work we used this tutorial.
We managed to make the motors move and the machine to draw.


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