Week 16 - Wild Card
- A digital process
- You have to make something
- define your own specification
I want to…
- Learn more about G-Code,
- Do something relevant for my final project,
- Come up with a new way to use a machine,
- Prevent a broken USB micro connector, which gets looser each use.
So, I’m thinking…
To hack a pen plotter and add more features. Document the custom G-code, and steps (We would be losing the Axi-Draw Firmware I’m pretty sure, but adding Wi-Fi and an SD Card Reader). Add paint pot and other tool features (has to be inside the A4, so reduces the usable size).
We have an AxiDraw v3 (A4 version),
And a FluidNC TMC2209 controller by Bart Dring.
And a few of these types of fans:
The board on the AxiDraw is this one (EggBot Board, v 2.7) by Brian Schmalz.
EggBotBoard by Brian Schmalz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License .
Acquired by Bre Pettis, to be part of Bantam Tools in NYC.
The Bantam Tools version is called NextDraw.
Up to and including v3, the software license is GNU General Public License v2.0.
Not sure about the hardware yet. But the EBB is CC Attrubution, by Brian Schmalz.
Looking at the terminals on the EBB and the Fluid NC board looks like a pretty straightforward swap to get started…
The idea here is to sacrifice a bit of work space to allow use of other tools, eg brushes, space for future toolchange rack.
The Web installer to Flash the Wi-Fi Firmware.
It is not mentioned, that you have to power the board, to access over USB.
It is then available on its own hotspot. Join that, and enter credentials for the network you want to use.
In our case, it is a specific IoT network provided by our university. I contacted out IT department, asked them to reserve the IP address, and to provide a network bridge to the network we use on our personal devices.
Then, uploaded a config file:
Which was based on the official ‘TMC2209_corexy.yaml’ example. Which came from the FluidNC config files, published by the developer @bdring.
I started wiring up the board.
But I got some magic smoke from a chip near the servo connector… I don’t know what it was, and the web interface still loads.