Category: Makelangelo

Makelangelo

Makelangelo software 7.26.0 beta

2021-09-10 Dan

This Makelangelo software 7.26.0 beta release brings several changes that should improve drawings and quality of life. It is a pre-release for the very brave. If you do try it then please come to our Discord, introduce yourself, and tell us about the experience so we can make it better.

All new firmware

Before Marginally Clever Robots was even conceived I was learning to move motors with Arduino. As time went on 3D printers arrived and the Marlin firmware in my Prusa printers got really really good. So good, in fact, that I make a fork of the Marlin 2.0.9.1 code and taught it to run a Makelangelo 5 robot. It is smoother, faster, and it means going forward I will have more time to do the things Marginally Clever Robots is good at.

Firmware update tool for Windows

Built into the Makelangelo app is a new firmware update tool. Your robot must be on and connected via USB cable. The app should not be connected to the robot yet.

  • avrDude path: is the location of the windows tool that uploads the .hex file to your robot. A copy has been included in this release. If you have Arduino software installed it will try to use that instead.
  • *.hex file: is the file to upload. This release includes a file called firmware-2021-09-10.hex.
  • Port: is the COM port your robot appears on when USB connected.
  • Refresh: will update the COM port list if you add/remove a robot.
  • Start: will initiate the upload process. It can take up to 2 minutes.

Sending code to the robot

The correct way to send a file to the robot is to use Makelangelo > Save to File/SD card. Save the *.gcode file to your SD card (included with the robot) and run your code from the robot.

Quality of Life

I want to separate the “make art” part of the app from the “drive robot” part of the app. You will find new top level menu items for all art stuff, and the right hand panel is for driving-only.

They are as follows:

  • Makelangelo > New: start over
  • Makelangelo > Open File: open an image file and begin converting it to lines.
  • Generate Art: The name hasn’t changed, only the location. The artwork does not “stack” – a new creation will replace the old one.
  • Art Pipeline: This might be renamed later to “tools”. It includes things like scaling, flipping, and the Simplify and Reorder actions. Until now every image loaded automatically ran simplify and reorder, even if you were not done experimenting with your image conversion. Now you must do it explicitly. Take note of your estimated drawing time, it will often drop by large amounts!

Final thoughts

This release does not respond to connect + drive commands. It tries to connect, does not recognize the new firmware, and then never unlocks the driving buttons. At this time I want to gauge your feelings about the new firmware and the quality of life changes.

The tool works in Windows only. It should make life easier for 99% of the artists out there. The firmware upload tool is only designed for the Makelangelo 5 robot.

This version of the Makelangelo Software app is written for Java 15. Get Java SE 15 here.

For the rest of you… please come to our Discord, introduce yourself, and we’ll figure it out together!

Makelangelo

Testing the Bleeding Edge of the Makelangelo App

2020-07-02 Dan

As I and other devs write new features into the Makelangelo App, we push our shared code to Github where it is automatically compiled, tested, and packaged in Nightly Builds. These nightly builds have unconfirmed bug fixes, delicate new features, and that new code smell. This is so we can get and implement your feedback as quickly as possible. We recommend you try the nightly build before reporting a bug to our issues list.

The builds aren’t actually nightly – they happen any time a new copy of the code is pushed to Github. This way we have the tightest turnaround and best acceleration in class.

There are never more than 3 nightly builds. You’ll probably want to unpack this on top of an existing copy of the latest official release because the fix file will replace the one in your install.

Big shout out to https://github.com/WebFreak001/deploy-nightly/ and IRC#github for their help making this work. You rock!

Makelangelo News

Makelangelo dev blog 2020 #2

2020-01-17 Dan

Out of office

January 18-30 I will be out of the country for some down time. Jin will still be here working on testing machines and filling orders, but no custom builds of Makelangelo Huge will be happening.

Experimental

In the development branch of Makelangelo software there’s always lots going on.

Get the Makelangelo 7.22.6 experimental here.

Pi camera

Github user Mishafarms has added raspberry pi camera support: If you run the software on a pi with a camera it can detect your camera and then use that as a source for images to convert. Nicely done!

Smooth speed improvements

I’ve put in a TON of work to improve the top speed and reducing stutter. I’m currently drawing at 100mm/s and moving (without drawing) at 400mm/s. So it’s now faster and bigger than an AxiDraw plotter. The motors move so smoothly now that they sound almost musical.

Long file names

Another nice to have is that the menus are more responsive on the LCD panel and the filenames on SD cards are now full-length instead of 8 characters.

European number formats

Thanks to the patient feedback of user Joram Neumark I’ve been working to improve support for european users. German computers (or computers with the German Locale) write numbers with a comma instead of a decimal, and the robot does not understand. It doesn’t know it’s in Germany! So instead I’m make sure all numbers written to files are done in the format the robot expects.

Please post to the forums with your experience!