Dan
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> only shifted to the right on the board approximately 5″ down and 6″ right of the ‘origin’ of the calibration pattern.
Photo? That sounds very strange.
> Also, the pen holder hugs the board surface when not drawing and away from the surface when drawing.
Yes, that’s backwards.
A Makelangelo 3 can’t auto-home (it does not have homing switches south of the motors), so the D7-D9 & D11 commands are meaningless to M3.
Pen up and pen down is completely different from “does not turn on at all”. separate issues. I’m glad you got the machine turning on and (i infer) servo moving.
In Settings > Pen you can change the up and down angles, as well as test them before you save your new settings. I doubt these settings are saved into the robot’s memory, it’s only in the software. it was done this way long ago on the idea that one software could run many robots and the up/down value would never need to be useful stored in the robot’s brain. change my mind?
There’s more to the setup than just replacing the board and installing the firmware. EEPROM settings need to be updated.
For most Makelangelo 5 machines it’s enough to send a D11 once. It can be further tweaked after that with D7-D9.
I’ve only had to explain the process maybe once before because we don’t ship unfinished machines.One thing you might try is a Y shape at the end of the strings. Notice how the official pen holder has the long arms that get wider as they approach the pen holder. The two triangles create stability by holding the two ends of the pen steady.
Are your belts slipping on the pulleys?
Are the pulleys tight on the motors?
What do you mean when you say “inconsistent”?
That numerical discrepancy can’t be a rounding error. very strange.
Do the pulleys ACTUALLY have 20 teeth? One time we had an order where some units had 18 and were marked as 20, but we got rid of the whole batch a long time ago.
That looks like the same board, yes. notice that the cable on the original servo has the red and black wires switched. if you pug in a normal servo without switching the wires you might kill the servo.
Have you run the robot connected through the software at least once? When the settings change in the software it sends a gcode command that updates the robot’s memory, after which home should be correct. If it is not correct then that’s an issue I will fix.
There is no D2 command. There is a G2 for drawing curves. What thread (link please) are you talking about?
Is this a RUMBA board on a Makelangelo 5? I don’t know local German retailers, so I would look on Aliexpress.com or Amazon.de. Of course we’d be happy to sell you a board, but I appreciate how expensive shipping can be.
SVG support in Makelangelo is very limited. I would try opening the file in Inkscape (free), make sure to “ungroup” and “convert to path” all objects, then save to dxf and load in makelangelo.
3 line segments in the file sounds very small. Looks like one pen up, one move to start, and one move back home.
First check your cable is in ok. Then connect software, and try the pen up and pen down moves in the settings panel. I say in the settings panel because there you can also check the angle values are not both set to the same thing (never happened before, but who knows?)
If it fails all those tests, it’s probably dead. either motor has burned out or plastic gear teeth have worn off and you’ll need to replace the servo.
AFAIK the MKS Gen v1.4 board is not currently supported by makeangelo software. Do you have the pin configuration? It could be added.
> am i right in thinking your software won’t allow manual mode if software doesn’t see motors attached to the control board?
> software doesn’t see motors attached to the control board
This confuses me. the software can never “see” motors attached. at best the software gets the correct “hello world, I am a MACHINE_X” and then it knows “oh right, i support machine_x, i will now let you do…things.
@raphmann you’ll have to provide more detail than “dxf-export has a bug.” how do i recreate it?
Please send me the image and the steps you are taking. I will see what I can do.
Where do the results go wrong? Did you ungroup everything? Some DXF elements are….exotic? and might not be fully supported by the software. Send me a link to your SVG and DXF files, I’ll test them here.
The home position is a known starting location for the pen. It is above the edge of a sheet of A2 paper. At shows we would draw many pictures and homing to 0,0 was annoying. Either the pen goes there first and then I slide the paper under the pen holder OR I put the paper up and then I can’t see the home position. Better a home position that is not covered by the paper.
Clicking “set home” tells the robot that the pen is at the home position. Otherwise it has no idea if you are ready.
In theory some code could be written to customize the home position, and most users would keep their existing (default) home position.
Testing this myself, I found a bug in DXF file exporting. The code looks for lines that match the pen up and pen down commands so that it can ignore pen up moves (non-drawing). it was incorrectly missing all up and down commands because the up and down lines had a return (\n) on the end. This has been fixed in commit c44e6434ff15220d66c07937873d112e22000033. It is available immediately to testers and developers. The rest of the world will get it when I make an official update.
I have yet to find the cause of the bug. thank you for your updates!
More generally, after generating gcode a script could re-arrange all pen-up moves to try and find nearest neighbors.
afaik this is a np-complete problem, nobody has a best solution that works in known finite time.
40% of the time in which drawings?
40% of the time in which drawings?
For example, in DXF files if you select “optimize dxf on load” it will sort the lines to be vastly more efficient.
Ok, this makes the search area for the bug much smaller. Thank you.
yes, in the serial monitor. Baud is 57600. make sure “send newline” is on.
– connect robot
– open settings
– change size
– close settings
– DO NOT DISCONNECT
– open settings againAre the numbers still wrong? Your last two posts did not answer my question.
When the machine beeps, look at the LCD. it is probably telling you to change pens and click the button.
