Category: News

News

The missing Spot Micro PCB is here!

2020-04-10 Dan

So you built a Spot Micro (or you want to) and – because you’re very clever – you read the instructions first. You probably noticed there’s a section where you have to build a PCB from scratch. For a lot of people, that’s beyond their skill level …for now. In the meantime, nothing should hold you back from building a sweet walking robot dog, amiright? Cool.

Here’s a board we used in the past for a stewart platform, which are a type of robot you can read about elsewhere on this site. It’s a good start for driving a robot dog. ELEC-0132 stewart platform board was designed for 11 PWM signals out and 6 analog values in. I’m betting that one of them can be used as an extra out signal to drive all 12 motors in the Spot Micro’s legs.

The boards are made by OSHPark and you can get them here:

https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/uGE0oIwR

But maybe wait until I test this theory. If I do this post will be updated with a part 2 right here:

News

Victims of Success

2020-01-19 Dan

Just as I was getting on a plane to a very remote location, the website became so popular that Apache rolled over and gave up. It took a while to get through my own darn security to fix things. While I was at it, I upped settings that should handle more traffic. Thank you for your patience and understanding!

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!