tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22562429890295761542024-02-20T02:29:16.228-05:00Electronic TinkeringBluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2256242989029576154.post-91969553327901436792015-08-21T20:17:00.003-04:002015-08-21T20:17:56.348-04:00Laser cutter Buildlog: Arduino and RAMPSThis post can be considered a work in progress. It'll be upgraded as I discover new problems that other users are having. Last update: Aug 20th, 2015<br />
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I use a fork of the 3D printer firmware called "Marlin" on my Arduino
MEGA to control my laser. Specifically, I use a fork by the user Turnkey
Tyranny <a href="https://github.com/TurnkeyTyranny/buildlog-lasercutter-marlin" target="_blank">available here</a>. I use <a href="https://inkscape.org/en/" target="_blank">Inkscape</a> for all of my design work, as well as <a href="https://github.com/TurnkeyTyranny/laser-gcode-exporter-inkscape-plugin" target="_blank">Turnkey Tyrannys fork of an Inkscape plugin</a> designed to export G-code suitable for his firmware.<br />
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If you have never used the Arduino IDE (software to upload firmware
to Arduino boards) before please take the time to go through a few of
the tutorials on the <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/">arduino.cc</a> website.<br />
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<a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage">Getting Started with Arduino</a></div>
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This
will tell you how to install the IDE, and give you a general idea of
how to upload new firmware. Once the Arduino IDE is installed, navigate
to the folder where you unzipped <a href="https://github.com/TurnkeyTyranny/buildlog-lasercutter-marlin" target="_blank">Turnkeys fork of Marlin</a>.
Double click on "Marlin.ino" and it will open in the Arduino IDE with
all of its associated files. If you use File > Open it may not load
all the required files. Connect your Arduino via USB, make sure you have
the right board selected in the IDE, and click upload. If you get a
u8glib dependency error, you'll have to download the <a href="https://bintray.com/olikraus/u8glib/Arduino" target="_blank">u8glib library</a>
and install it. U8glib is required if you are using an LCD panel. I
highly recommend using an LCD panel as this allows you to use an SD card
to run the machine, rather than have a USB cord running to your
computer.<br />
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<a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Libraries" target="_blank">How to install new libraries for the Arduino IDE</a></div>
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Once
you have Turnkeys fork of Marlin installed, and the RAMPS board and LCD
stacked up, your LCD screen should turn on and look similar to this:<br />
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Now
you're ready to start plugging everything into the RAMPS board, but
FIRST and most important.. look on the RAMPS board for diode D1. You
MUST remove this diode before wiring the laser cutter up. It will
suffice to just clip the leads and remove the diode, but its a bit of a
tight fit so I desoldered it from the back.<br />
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If
you do not remove D1, then the RAMPS board will attempt to route 24v
from the stepper circuits to the 5 volt regulator on the Arduno. It's not rated to step that much voltage, so it will fry and possibly ruin your Arduno MEGA.<br />
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Some buildlogs have suggested removing the yellow Polyfuses from the
board as well, and bridging their connectors. I did not do this, and
have not noticed any trouble even after running the machine for more
than an hour one one design. You're mileage may vary. If you have issues with brownouts or the machine shutting down randomly, I would suspect the fuses may be causing some issues. <br />
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<br />Bluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2256242989029576154.post-26762083738202882242015-06-29T15:11:00.001-04:002015-06-29T15:17:39.927-04:00Using Inkscape with Turnkey Tyrannys pluginIf you've been following along you'll notice that I have been using Turnkey Tyrannys fork of an Inkscape plugin <a href="https://github.com/TurnkeyTyranny/laser-gcode-exporter-inkscape-plugin" target="_blank">available here</a> for my laser cutter design work. He has a nice set of instructions already wrote up on how to install the plugin, so I won't reinvent the wheel there. This post is more on how to go about designing and cutting your first part using his plugin, and a few things that I've picked up on in the last few months of using it.<br />
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First, I highly recommend using cutting_surface.svg template that he provides with the plugin. This already has page and document settings set to the correct units for his plugin to operate. If you would like your rules and objects to be in a different unit of measurement (mm or inch), then press Ctrl-Shift-D while in inkscape to open the Document Properties dialog. <br />
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Under the General heading you'll find "Default Units". In the screenshot above they are set to Inch, since I'm stateside. This are the displayed units on your rulers, as well as the default units when fine adjusting objects and text within your design. For everyone else, you'll probably want to work in mm. Weirdos. Just select it from the drop down box and you're good to go. About midway down you'll see "Custom Size" where you can change the page size that is displayed, and the Units that it is saved as. The plugin requires Units to be in pixels, px, in order to work properly. If this is changed you'll receive an error when attempting to export telling you to change it back.<br />
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Ok! On to actually designing something. We'll start with something easy, a basic keychain. First, you'll want to select the "rectangle" tool (highlighted red, below) from the toolbox along the left side of the screen, and draw a rough shape that you would like. (Your colors and line thickness may vary from the screenshots. We will fix this in a bit)<br />
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Now, keychains aren't very friendly with such sharp corners, so lets round those off. You can use the small circle anchors to do this freehand, or the dialog boxes highlighted in yellow above. I set Rx and Ry both to 0.500 for a full radius on the ends, and adjusted the overall size to be 3.0" wide and 1.0" high. You'll end up with something that looks like this:<br />
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Using the circle tool, give yourself a hole to thread a keyring into. Keep in mind everything is still in a rough state, so don't worry too much about placement. We can drag things around later once we have everything we want.<br />
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Let's add some text, using the text tool. Just click where you want and start typing away. If the text runs out of room, you can use the selection anchors to push and pull it into the size you need.<br />
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Hey, it's starting to look like a keychain! Sweet! Ok, now we need to adjust a few settings so the laser cutter understands what we are trying to do. First, we have to adjust the Fill and Stroke of any object that we want the laser to pay attention to. On the top menu, click on Object > Fill and Stroke. It should appear in the tray on the right side of the screen, or off on its own window depending on how you have Inkscape configured. You'll have 3 tabs: Fill, Stroke, and Stroke Style. Using shift, select each object you'd like to vector cut. For vector cut lines, you will want to set it to No fill, a solid stroke(flat color), and a stroke style width of 0.001". <br />
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This will make your lines pretty hard to see, so be sure to zoom in until you can see what you are working with. <br />
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Now a quick little explanation of how the plugin views different objects in Inkscape.. Anything you draw in Inkscape is considered an object, and will be exported as raster data. In order to turn these into vector cut lines, you must change them to a Path instead of Object. Simple enough, with your two objects still selected click on Path > Object to Path. This will allow the plugin to export them properly, otherwise you'll just get an engraving of your cutout line, instead of actually cutting it out. Keep in mind, we only have two objects selected and converted to path right now.. not the text. We want to leave the text as an object that way it exports as a raster correctly.<br />
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Now, you should end up with something that looks like this. <br />
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Now it's time to tell the laser what power settings we want. Turnkeys plugin requires a pretty specific Layer Name in order to set power levels and feed rates. <br />
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The Marlin firmware has a setting inside the code that limits its max power to a certain frequency. The first section of the layer name in Inkscape defines what percentage of that max power to use. (Future reference, a 70% power level in Inkscape on my machine gives me 18ma of power, the max rating for my 40 watt CO2 laser tube. I never set it above 70 for this reason.) The highlighted layer above has a 10% power(of that max power set inside the marlin firmware), with a Pulse Per Millemeter of 40, and a feed rate of 2500mm/m. Now, we know we want to cut these two paths out from whatever material we are using, so we need to change these settings to something a bit more reasonable. On my machine, I know I can cut 1/8th inch acrylic with a power level of 68%, PPM of 40, and Feedrate of 250mm/m. So, my layer name will be: <b>68 [ppm=40,feed=250]</b></div>
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Select both paths you would like cut out at the above settings, right click on them, and move them to that layer. Next, we will move the text to a separate layer and adjust its power settings to 15% power, with a feed rate of 3000mm/m and PPM of 40. If you have empty layers, you can remove them with the blue minus button in the layer tray. They don't hurt anything, but it makes it easier to keep track of which layers/power levels you are using.</div>
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Once your two vector paths and your raster object text are finished, select all 3 of them. It's time to export to a gcode file that the laser can read. If you have the plugin installed correctly, click on Extensions > Export > Turnkey Laser Exporter... <br />
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For this tutorial, I'll be using an SD card to transfer the gcode to the laser. Click on the Advanced tab, and make sure "Are you using Pronterface?" is *not* checked. Leave the rest of the options as default, and click on Apply. Once it's done processing you'll get the below notification. Check it carefully to make sure it looks like what you are expecting. </div>
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There, we can see that we have two vector lines, and one raster. This coincides with what we drew, a cutout for the keychain, a cutout for the hole, and the raster text data. You'll find the gcode file on your desktop. Just copy that over to SD, and off to the laser you go! Insert the SD card, power everything up, and use the dial to navigate to "Print from SD" and select your file. Be sure to have your water pump and exhaust fan going, as well as any safety interlocks you have installed. <br />
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Keep in mind, this is just a very simple tutorial to get your feet wet. I'll be writing another tutorial soon that involves importing artwork and going over how to organize your layers and objects to cut in an order that makes sense. (inside cuts first, before outside, etc). Have fun, and don't burn the house down! :)<br />
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<br />Bluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2256242989029576154.post-46174345669593011622015-04-02T17:17:00.000-04:002015-06-29T15:20:59.426-04:00Laser build log, part 3I am so far behind on updating this.. I apologize. I've been focusing more on getting the machine running than I have documenting it. As it sits now, the machine is fully functional and pushing good test cuts. The past couple of weeks have been spent playing around in Inkscape using Turnkey Tyranys plugin. <a href="https://github.com/TurnkeyTyranny/laser-gcode-exporter-inkscape-plugin">https://github.com/TurnkeyTyranny/laser-gcode-exporter-inkscape-plugin</a><br />
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I've also been using his version of Marlin, and the two play together very nicely. Turnkey is still working on the plugin, but its looking better every day.<br />
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I joined a google group (<a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/opensource-laser">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/opensource-laser</a>) to talk with others who have done the same modification to their machine. We've also been discussing starting a Wiki for the K40 style lasers in order to document as much about them as we can, ie, power supply pinouts and wiring diagrams for an Arduino/RAMPS or DSP system upgrades. It should be nice to have everything in one central location for anyone to browse.<br />
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Once I get some more time, I may go back and edit the first couple of buildlog posts to clarify things. Rough drafts aren't my style, and I have horrible habits when documenting things for others.<br />
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I'm also very active in the Laser Engraving and Cutting group on Facebook. It is a closed group full of great members who use these machines every day. Many still use the Moshi board, and several have upgraded to a DSP system. If you're looking for a place to turn, it would be a great start.<br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/441613082637047/">https://www.facebook.com/groups/441613082637047/</a><br />
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<br />Bluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2256242989029576154.post-2889153618871328142015-03-02T18:37:00.001-05:002015-03-02T18:37:04.995-05:00Laser build log, part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
The postal service has been pretty nice to me the past week. So far the only thing I'm missing the get the laser up and running is a replacement tube, which should be here around the second week of March. As of right now I have some LED strip lighting installed in the cutting bay, and my RAMPS module is all wired in with a small quickie jumper board to get my endstops set.</div>
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Ignore the breadboard, I was trying to figure out how the endstops worked.I've gotten a new desk since the last time I really did any work in my office, so its a bit of a mess at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to condense everything to just one room and save my feet. I think I may be wearing a path in the carpet from the office to my spare bedroom, where the chassis is.<br />
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I removed the ribbon cable connector and soldered new endstop wiring directly to the board. The stepper motor wires were also lengthed, and everything tucked nicely into some 7mm x 7mm drag chain from Amazon.<br />
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Protip: Bundle your wires all together, then fish one wire through your dragchain pulling the rest behind it. Fishing 8 conductors through the drag chain took all of about 5 seconds this way.<br />
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Below is the quick and dirty board used for the endstops, to connect them to the RAMPS board. Everything is sitting on a piece of wood for now, until I figure out where everything will be mounted.<br />
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Oh yeah, I did some testing on the stepper movement too. I've uploaded a video to youtube in case you're interested in seeing some baby steps for my machine. :)<br />
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Ok, I think that brings the buildlog up to date. Time to get back to work. :)Bluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2256242989029576154.post-29941422463069173982015-03-02T18:07:00.001-05:002015-03-02T18:13:49.718-05:00I need a shark and some duct tape...Some of the best toys come in boxes that you cannot read. It also helps when said box is rather large.<br />
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I do have to say, I've been rather anxious for this to arrive. Its the
largest thing I've ever ordered, thats for sure. Inside the box, was
another box. Surprise! I'll spare the details, but once I got past the
Matryoshka doll packing job I was greeted with my brand new 40 watt CO2
Laser engraver/cutter.<br />
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All is not well though. Once I spun the machine around to access the
laser tube, I noticed something was a bit off. My brand new laser cutter
seemed to be crying. The rear panel was wet. Well, it did just travel
halfway across the world for me. I'm sure the trip over was a bit rough.
I've been worried about the laser tube breaking during shipment ever
since I ordered it. This laser had been test fired before, and seemed to
have passed. So, off to packing it went. Unfortunately, they didn't
drain all of the water out of the cooling system that surrounds the
lasers core tube. Water + Winter = Ice. Ice expands. Glass does not take
kindly to this act of physics, naturally, but it does leave some pretty
cool icicles behind.<br />
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Well, that explains why there is water leaking all over the place. There
is supposed to be a glass port for the water inlet over on this side,
but the ice expanded inside and broke it off. After letting the ice
inside the tube melt, everything else seems to be fine. I've already
contacted the seller and told him what happened. Right now they are on
holiday for the Chinese New Year, but he said he should have some more
information for me by the 25th. Of course I'm not going to settle for
anything less than a new replacement tube. If I were to purchase one
myself it would cost about $200 before shipping. *NOT* cheap to replace.
Once I get the new tube in, this one will be making a trip to Kokomo
Opalescent Glass to see if they can stick a new barb where the old one
broke off. I don't think the laser core glass is damaged, but if it is
I'll still have a really cool looking wallhanger.<br />
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As far as the electronics go, the controller and software supplied with
these engravers SUCKS. So much so, that it is better in the long run to
cut your losses and buy a new off the shelf controller system to stick
in here. There are several options, some of which can easily double the amount of money you have invested in the machine. I chose to go with an Arduino MEGA and RAMPS 1.4, running a modified version of the Marlin firmware.<br />
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Since I am still waiting on a new laser tube, I went ahead and gutted everything from inside the machine. No sense wasting any time.<br />
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Even though there is a lot going on inside the machine, none of it
really takes up a whole lot of room. I toyed with the idea of extending
the gantry to cover the width of the machine, hiding the electronics
under the laser tube, but decided that it would be too much work at this
time. I'm more concerned with getting the laser up and running before I
go adding in bonus features like an extended cutting surface or a
motorized Z axis. It really is pretty spacious inside once its stripped out, but it fills back up pretty fast too.I'll have to do something different with the smoke hood. It is WAY too
small, even for this machine. Another project for another day down the
road. What I'll probably end up doing is ripping the whole assembly out
and then just leaving the hole in the back wide open for a new (higher
power) blower motor. I'll have to come up with a way to seal the cutting
area off into its own little "room" so to speak, to keep excess dust
and smoke out of the electronics bay and laser tube. Probably something
as simple as adhesive vinyl sheeting, since it won't be in danger of any
sustained laser strikes.<br />
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Now then, I finally have the gantry out for all the world to see. After a
quick dusting (cleaning isn't part of their assembly process btw) I can
start figuring out how its all wired up.<br />
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The flat ribbon cable connects to this board, and
carries the signal from the X and Y limit switches back to the
mainboard, as well as the 4 signal wires to control the Y-axis stepper.
The X-axis stepper has a standard 4 pin plug, and about 10 feet of spare
wire tucked into its tidywrap.<br />
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Oh yeah.. when I was taking the laser tube out I realized there was a
bit more broken than I had thought. I don't think its going to be able
to be repaired though. The way these tubes are constructed, the end caps
are siliconed on. I don't think a glassblower would appreciate a bunch
of silicone burning off right where they are trying to make a repair.
What I might be able to do though is have a new cap made that will fit
over the old cap. I'm not too concerned with repairing this one though,
not until I get the replacement and the machine is working. So, for now,
it'll sit on the shelf looking all sexy and laserish.<br />
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Well, that about covers it for the teardown. I'm already a week behind with keeping the buildlog updated, so expect another post in the next day or so. LOTS more pictures to document.<br />
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<br />Bluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2256242989029576154.post-83260632506205268542011-01-14T02:28:00.001-05:002011-01-14T02:29:21.329-05:00Battery Backpack<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9CoZQ55AM-tEhgefCI0GUw8Y8uDbB8uAajwxR4mxhAr_QyxqTvbzErcXkd0TW1GsnlHSQMS5KMk3lbrFcDfq0GBPLJGg834n8dQ_VBE_jawqNk46kA6azPZ4XXZSSoX7P4WrxTtYxW9s/s1600/166674_495421783965_811663965_5919578_156112_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9CoZQ55AM-tEhgefCI0GUw8Y8uDbB8uAajwxR4mxhAr_QyxqTvbzErcXkd0TW1GsnlHSQMS5KMk3lbrFcDfq0GBPLJGg834n8dQ_VBE_jawqNk46kA6azPZ4XXZSSoX7P4WrxTtYxW9s/s320/166674_495421783965_811663965_5919578_156112_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>A few months ago I built a small "backpack" for my rechargable battery pack in order to bring the 9.6v battery to a more microcontroller friendly 5v. Well, it lasted for a good while but then I ended up snapping the LM7805 regulator off the board. Instead of repairing it, I decided to make a new one. The new version uses binding posts instead of female headers, and also breaks out the source voltage. It's a bit larger then the last one, but still fits on the battery pack.<br />
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As you can see, I had a cheap bent piece of aluminum for a heatsink before, and things were a bit crowded. I'm going to miss the female headers, but if it becomes a problem there is still room to add them on the new board.Bluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2256242989029576154.post-69969494417184892282011-01-09T02:53:00.002-05:002011-01-09T03:04:12.452-05:00Electronic Dice The past couple of weeks I've been building some electronic dice based on a project I read at <a href="http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/projects/dice.htm">The Electronics Club</a>. Since I live in the US its pretty hard to find stripboard, so this project just sat on the back burner until one day I decided to toss it together on breadboard. My last order from Mouser had landed me enough parts to build 5 of these, so instead of letting it gather dust I mocked one up.<br />
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Once I was comfortable with the circuit, I went ahead and started to work on soldering one up on perfboard. Starting out, I had planned on making it look nice from the front and the back. Turns out thats a lot harder to do on the fly.<br />
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As I got closer and closer to finishing the board, I had to cut a lot of corners and make a lot of nasty runs of wire all over the board to reach where I wanted. It works, but it does not look very good at all.<br />
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I attribute this to a lack of planning ahead, and only having huge wire to work with at the time. It's also one of the first projects that I've converted from schematic to breadboard to perfboard.<br />
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When I finished though, I got an idea for an electronic D20 dice using an Arduino and one of my MAX7219 chips. I quickly hit up the new breadboards I had put down and put down the basic circuit to play with. Once I had some basic code working I fired up the soldering iron.<br />
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I started out with the same size board, but this one had generic traces laid out on the rear, with plenty of spots to tie into power and ground. I wouldn't need to make huge runs of wire like I had last time.<br />
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Once I started hooking this one all up, I noticed that I may run into the same problem that I did with previous projects: My wire is way too big to be trying to route around and have it look nice. Once I got the socket for the MAX7219 soldered down, I knew I had to do something different with my wire. I wasn't going to have enough room to make the connections needed!<br />
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A quick trip to Radioshack solved that problem. $25 later I have 3 colors of 30AWG wirewrap wire, and the tool to go along with it. It was already too late to do the project the proper way of using wirewrap, but I had an idea. Just use the wirewrap as normal wire and solder it down where I needed it. Since it is so small I can easily bundle a bunch of wire together and they take up hardly any space at all. I think I've found a new way to make my projects! :)<br />
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This one I am proud of, and everyone I show it to is really amazed at how nice it looks. The final product has a select switch to choose between a 20 sided dice, or a 100 sided. Coding the Arduino was a cinch. There is a handy built in random number generator that works great for this. On the first digit, select a random number between 0 and 2, on the second digit between 0 and 10. If both digits are 0, then force the first digit to be a 2 and you have a proper 20 sided die. The D100 didn't require anything like that at all. If both digits are 0, then it can be interpreted as 100.<br />
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The AVR on board can still be reprogrammed as well, and I already have a few ideas on how to improve this board. By adding a temp sensor, I can display the ambient temperature in my apartment. A bit overkill for a thermometer, but hey.. I'm just tinkering. Speaking of.. I need to get back to working on version 2 of the 6 sided dice. I enjoyed the look of the 30AWG wire so much that I decided to build another dice, only this time I took what I learned and improved the design a lot more. That will be for a later post though.<br />
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Once I got home and tore into the poor guy, I started thinking that this was all looking very similar to Calebs creation. Going back to the contest I found out that somehow I had managed to buy the exact same Santa that he had.<br />
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I decided to tear into it anyways, just to see what I had to work with. Turns out Caleb was right.. the mechanics inside this toy are a great starting point for a walking robot. He had cut and melted a lot of pieces to make his legs, but by simply bending the coathanger arms a little the toy will creep along backwards on its own.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5044/5336059313_2850089409_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5044/5336059313_2850089409_b.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
I can't very well copy what he made, so now I'm stuck on ideas. The walking aspect is already done, and all I did was bend some wire! That's not going to get me any credit! I'm thinking that the stuffing may need to come into play somehow, but I'm still not sure. So, for now, the project is on hold until I can figure out what to do.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5049/5336673858_658dffaa3a_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5049/5336673858_658dffaa3a_b.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Bluewraithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05445815253420475067noreply@blogger.com0