File
Cut Files for Cardboard Stages
This project started under the auspices of not having gestalt boards. While the rest of the crew was panicked about what to do with respect to controlling the motors, I was busy cutting cardboard down to size.
Colten, Jess and I also tore apart a couple old printers for parts. One was our local instructor Mercedes Mane's Fab Academy project, an old MTM snap, as well as a Durbie Prusa Mendle.
Musical Interlude
After we had our scavenged rails measured, Virginia put in their dimensions to the Rhino Code supplied, and I laser cut the first batch of cardboard for an axis. There was some problems with the files I noted, where the laser cut pieces fully when it should have just made folding pieces. I don't know if they were in the original Rhino code supplied or part of Virginia's getting the file prepped for our laser. Painters tape solved the problem anyway.
The evening finished with the five of us having one axis constructed. Subsequent construction projects were similar and quicker after we had solved the axis puzzle once and fixed the laser cutting files to be proper.
Jeff Putney and Colten Jackson handled the electrical work. I am amazed by their ability to finish things quickly. I came in after a weekend, and Colten shows me how he I can draw using a tablet and the motors will draw it out on the machine.
They gave me a brief rundown of how it works. The master code has an I2C bus connected to the slave motor boards. Start by drawing on the tablet. Processing coverts the path from the tablet into a signal it sends to the master arduino board. The arduino board takes the signal and recodes it into commands for the slave nodes connected to the motors. The signal has either new move instructions e.g. distance and direction, or an execute move general call. The slave reads the commands and sets a pin high or low to control forward or backward, and moves when it gets the a command to move.