Category Archives: Build Details

Making a DIY Computer Controlled Loom

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Weaving on a loom is fun. I gave my son a simple loom for Christmas, and he wove an entire scarf on Christmas Day. This got me thinking about building a computer controlled loom, maybe one that could weave any pattern imaginable. I liked the idea of taking software back to its very origins with Jacquard and the original Jacquard Loom. I also new there’d be lots of interesting design challenges.

In mid December, TechShop had filed for bankruptcy. My annual Christmas Project was in full swing, and the loss forced me to “Cancel Christmas”.  I was in shock. I’d been using TechShop tools/space for 10 years, and no longer having access to their lasers, Industrial Sewing Machines, etc was paralyzing. By Christmas day, I was starting to recover and was looking for a new project. Hopefully, one that could use the PCBs that I’d already designed for my canceled project.

I still had access to a 3D printer.  Could I design a mostly-3D-printed loom that used the boards’ 3-stepper motor controllers and bluetooth LE?  I’d give it a shot! The basic idea I had was for a 2-motor loom.  One motor would sweep through a bunch of cams, and the other motor would set the position of each cam in turn.

I took the basic specs of my son’s loom as a good starting point for basic size/layout. His is a 10″ loom with 8 threads per inch, so each control section of the loom would have to be 1/8″ wide, and there would be 80 of these sections. An initial sketch of the mechanism indicated 7 parts per section, so the loom would have more that 560 moving parts that would all have to operate flawlessly time after time, row after row, 100s of times per piece of material.  I told my friends up front that it seems impossible and that this thing was never going to work, but working on the design would be really fun and get me out of my post-TechShop project funk.

Now real weaving is an art that involves rhythm, consistency, and pattern. This would never be that. The time to update the cams would be too slow for any real rhythm, but there might still be some fun art and process to it, and stringing up the loom would be quick and easy in comparison to warping a traditional loom. I also had some ideas for programatic pattern generation.  Wouldn’t it be neat to weave out something unexpected? Discovering it row by row? That sounded like fun to me.

A much faster system could be built with 80+ solenoids or something, but that didn’t really appeal to me. It would drive the cost way up and certainly wouldn’t take advantage of these circuit boards I had lying around.

The Big Idea

At the heart of the loom is a long row of cams sitting on a square shaft. In order to not have this giant row of cams jamming up horribly, the cams would have to have almost no load. The square shaft locks most of the cams in position but has one section that can rotate to spin a single cam. The main idea was to have the cams not do the lifting and lowering of threads directly, but to have them shift some hooks back and forth. If the hook was over a bar, then the bar could do the work of raising and lowering the threads.

In order to be able to pull threads up or down, I use a second set of hooks and a teeter-totter arrangement. With a second set of bars and hooks, this also makes it very easy to invert the pulling up/down pattern, so an alternating weave requires no change in the cams or hook positions. It also avoids extra loads imposed by something like a per-thread return spring or weight and doubles the distance between the threads.

At first I worked on getting the carriage working. It had to slide back and forth smoothly with little backlash. I did some initial prototypes using just 1/4″ bronze bushings and flat end caps. These basically jammed all the time since the 3D printed flat plates could easily flex enough to take the bushings out of alignment. I changed the design to be much stiffer and to use one pair of linear bearings with a larger main shaft that does all the load bearing and a second 1/4″ shaft with no bearings at all that is just provides additional rigidity and alignment.

Would it work at all?

Even though the carriage movement back and forth was now working without jamming, the first time I tried to rotate a cam and seek to the next cam caused a horrible jam. The issue was that after driving the cam there’s still a lot of load from the cam on the square plate, so when you try to seek to the next position that load makes the cam really want to jam on any imperfection between the rotating square segment and the rest of the shaft, and those loads keep adding up as you rotate more cams. Thankfully this was easy to fix in software by overshooting a tiny bit and then returning so there was no longer any load from the cam before trying to seek to the next position. After fixing that, the system seemed to work. I did a 16-thread build and wove this strip of patterned material, then I built it out to 36 threads and wove these pandas.

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Problems at scale

So after those successes, I built the loom out to 60 cams. Horrifyingly, at 60 cams I discovered an issue where the hooks really needed to be slightly thinner because the cumulate drag on each other kept adding up. It’s terrible to find issues that only manifest at 60 layers because it is not easy to iterate on a design if you have to reprint 120 hooks for each revision. This is why I started at 8 layers since I could print out 8 or 16 new parts fairly quickly. I probably went though something like 9 revisions on the cams adding features, adjusting things so that they could slide more smoothly long the square shaft, and adding some gaps in their contact ring so you can actually peek in and see where the cam mover is located. Trying to do that iteration with 120 parts is a whole different ball game since it can only print maybe 12 hooks a day it takes me close to 2 weeks of printing to change the design.

The other big issue when going up to 60 layers was that just using dead reckoning to position the cam mover exactly in each of the cams started to no longer work. Slight variations in cam thickness made it so just dividing the full range by 60 and assuming you would be in the right place stops working. I’m sure if these were identical injection-molded parts that might work at 60+ layers, but for my hand-crafted cams it stopped working. Everything was fine at 40, but when you go up to 60 it just starts falling apart. I ran into this issue on Christmas Eve after one year of working on the loom and had to give up on giving any 60-thread woven gifts for Christmas that year.  Oops.  Fail.

Adding cam position sensing

At this point, I really wanted a way to tell which position each of the cams is in, so on power up the loom would be able to scan though and check the physical state of the loom. Up until this point, I’d just been leaving the loom in a known state or manually adjusting the cams to that state, and that was a drag. Thankfully I’d put a IR gap sensor leg on each of the cam followers. When the cam was fully forward, the IR sensor would not be blocked, but when the cam was all the way back the IR sensor would be fully blocked. The IR gap sensor moved around with the cam driver, so it always knows about the current cam follower position. This made it easy to write some code to scan though all the cam positions and read the state of all the followers. This really reduced the startup time on the loom if I had left it in some random cam state on power off.

In order to view the IR sensor output directly, I added a way to poll it over bluetooth so I could see a kind of chart recorder output from the sensor. This made it easier to set the various thresholds and also see how much noise was in the signal.

IR Sensor reading a cam position. The wires for the sensor run inside that brass tube.

How do you deal with positioning if the cams are not all identical?

At first, I thought I could scan for the cam positions using the IR sensor I’d added that detects cam positions.In theory that might work, but sadly because the cam followers are thin enough to not rub against one another and float a bit on the cams, there’s a lot of noise in the exact positions relative to the cams.  So scanning their positions was not really the silver bullet I’d hoped for.  Thankfully I had another idea. I could number all the cams then assemble the loom with JUST the cams. Then I used my phone to manually seek the positioner section to the center of every 10th cam. I wrote down those values and wrote some interpolation software that would compute cam positions interpolating between those values. This caps the interpolation error. It’s almost like having six 10-cam looms lined up. Then you just have to re-assemble the loom with the cams in the same order. This was somewhat annoying to do, but it totally worked, and I was back in business.

The hardest part?  The On/Off switch.

After the loom was no longer jamming, I worked on redesigning the PCB and making an integrated enclosure. The problem was that the original board had been designed for something that was never going to be turned off, so it used 2 power supplies and had no support for an on/off switch. When I designed the board, I decided I wanted to simplify down to a single high current 19v laptop supply and used a buck converter to generate the 5v needed for the LEDs/electronics. However, my initial choice of using an ACT4088 was a bad plan. It didn’t have great application notes, and my initial stab at layout caused some sort of power on spike that was killing all the downstream electronics. I blew up a number of those chips and even contacted some folks online who’d used them in their projects only to find out they’d had troubles with them too, especially when operating above 12v.  Clearly, I was trying to be too clever, and this was not working. I decided to make that piece of the design someone else’s problem by using a 3-pin switching regulator. I switched to the $3  VX7805-500 and got a whole new version of the PCB made.  (V3 at this point)

This seemed to work, but eventually the board would die on power up. Some sort of power on transient that was still killing my boards dead. This is kind of the worst way to die since you think it’s working, fully populate the board, and think you’re done, then it eventually dies and takes $40 of other components with it. At this point I very nearly gave up, but then at the very end I decided to try again with a somewhat more expensive Traco Power TSR 1-2450 three-pin regulator. I also tacked in a 5.6 zener to try and add some protection to the 5v rail and soldered a 10uf filter cap across the BTLE daughter board since that was the only daughter board that didn’t have its own decoupling cap. This seems to have worked. At least, the most recent build of the board has survived a zillion turn ons now, so I’m going to declare it working.  *knock wood*

Frankly, this version of the board is kind of crazy since it actually has the cam motor shaft passing through the board, and it uses a lot of space for a 3rd stepper motor controller that I never populate/don’t expect to populate after giving up on trying to calibrate in a second cam moving motor. So the board really should be shrunk down quite a bit, but it was fun making it fit the enclosure, etc.

One last try

I decided to warp the loom one last time and try once again to weave at 60 threads, and it finally worked without jamming. I could probably go a tiny bit higher on the thread count, but I punted on my original design plan of two cam movers since I was having enough trouble with getting one cam mover to not jam. This limited the range of travel/the total number of cams. It’s also good to have some free space on either side, so one can work in the guts of the loom if something goes wrong. I’ll probably stop at 60 instead of 80, since it’s slow enough as it is.

Video Mish-Mash

I deiced to video this project. However, I spent over a year making the loom and shooting video. During that time, I slowly got better at the video-making process, which means that the style and quality of the early videos is way worse than the later videos. This has made for a somewhat lumpy feeling for the final video. There are some sequences I’m very proud of, and others that I think are just horrible looking now. Oh well, it would be too much work to reshoot some of that stuff. It is what it is.

Where to now?

Well, I’m tempted to work on making the loom faster, but a year and a half is a long time to work on a project (for me). Most of my projects are < 6 months, so I may just move on. I would like to work on some error diffusion style weave dithering, maybe write some procedural weaving pattern stuff, but frankly I think all my friends, coworkers, and family have heard enough about weaving/looms to last a lifetime, so maybe I should work on something else.

I’ve open sourced all the designs and the code, but be warned these things are a dump of the design files/software as I made them. There are no instructions. It’s not the least bit cleaned up.  There may not even be super obvious names/labels, so trying to build a functioning loom from those files would be pretty difficult. I was barley able to get the thing to go, and I’m fairly meticulous when building these kinds of things. I’m relieved it worked. Still, if you’re interested in this kind of build, it might give you some inspiration and a place to see what others have done.  I’m kind of surprised there aren’t more of these things around. The ability to weave crazy designs is pretty awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make Yourself More Precise

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I’ve invented a new and exciting way to probe circuits more precisely. An old idea used in a new context. After using it, I can say it is a must for any electronics bench. What is it?

I have been building electronic circuits for a long time, but only in the last few years have I gone all-in with itty-bitty surface-mount parts. I built a reflow oven. I got a stereo microscope so I could see what I was doing, and I practiced soldering and reworking under the scope. I was surprised to discover that for many operations using surface-mount components was faster and easier than using through-hole packages. Why hadn’t I switched earlier?!

The one part that was getting harder was troubleshooting the boards.

 I had a board with a chip in a little QFN 28 package, and each pad was only 0.25 mm wide. The board wasn’t working. I really needed to figure out what was going wrong, but some of the important traces didn’t go though any exposed areas except at those tiny pads. How the heck was I going to probe this thing?

If I just went in with a scope probe, I was certain to short something out. I just don’t have a steady enough hand to poke around with sub 0.25 mm precision. That’s when it hit me. Engravers use something called a Pantographic Engraver to put the tiny lettering on wedding rings. Could I make some sort of Pantographic Probe to let me probe around the circuit willy-nilly with crazy precision? Yes. Yes, I could. That’s how the Pantoprobe was born.

You can build a Pantoprobe for < $20 if you have access to a 3D printer and a few hand tools.  The project has even been featured on Hack-a-Day and Makezine!
I hastily modeled a basic pantographic mechanism to 3D print. The one tricky part about a pantographic mechanism is that the joints have to have very little slop or stiction. I decided to use telescoping brass tubing at the hinge of each joint, with a pair of washers reducing vertical slope. I used a camera ball joint (that I had sitting around) as the base. This ball joint also lets you tilt the probe at different angles, providing an extra degree of freedom that most pantographs don’t have.

I printed a few test joints. The joint design seemed to work very smoothly, and I was ready to give the full assembly a try. What to use as the actual probe? I had some spring steel piano wire around, so I crimped a bit into another piece of tubing, ground a tapered pad on the end, and stuck the whole thing through the center of the pantograph’s output joint. That plus an alligator clip and it was time to take the probe for a test drive. Would it work?

I was amazed to discover that not only could I reliably place the probe on the center of the solder pigtail of those .25mm pads, but I could feel the probe pressing into the solder. Crazy! That tactile feedback really makes it nice to use. The contact is more than stable enough for me to look away long enough to read the oscilloscope/multi meter. Trouble shooting tiny boards will never be the same!

I did some more designs to make the probe fold up more tightly so it could fit in my pack of trouble-shooting widgets. I also ordered some cheap ball joints from China since it seemed like I’d be making more of these things. The probe was a HUGE win: Cheap, not that hard to build, makes the impossible possible. What else could I do with this idea?

I could already do Pick and Place with tweezers, and it wasn’t a big problem. I had some parts sitting around for building a suction pick and place tool, but I’d never gotten around to building it because, hell, I could just do it with tweezers. What if I gave the Pantoprobe an extra-precise rotational axis and plumbed a suction tip into it? Would that be awesome? So I built this Pantographic Pick and Place device.

Now THAT looks like a actual mad science invention. I used two o-rings to act as drive belts for an index-finger controlled rotational axis. The suction comes in via a pivot that then passes though the pantographs output axis and comes out to a syringe with swappable tips. Here you can see a small green tip holding an 0603 resistor. This was a bit more complicated to design.

My 3D printer really got a workout. I printed 7 different versions of just the hose clip! I went crazy and even designed a box to hold all the tips. In the end, it works, it’s nice, but it doesn’t have quite the super high return on investment that the Pantoprobe has. It’s only two 0-rings and a syringe kit more expensive to build than the Pantoprobe. As long as you already have some system to provide suction.

If you do a lot of pick and place and would like a steadier hand, you should build one. But it doesn’t make the impossible possible like the Pantoprobe. That’s the real killer app.

What else?

I realized that for measuring high frequency stuff the Kurt’s-random-piece-of-piano-wire sure left a lot to be desired. Maybe I could make a scope probe holder for the Pantoprobe?

The scope probe was going to have to stick out at an angle so I could still see the end under the microscope. Because it would stick out a long way from the axis, I had to worry about rotational slop. So I designed this rod that slides from the output joint though the opposite joint to lock rotation. At first I thought of this as just an insert that pops into a stock Pantoprobe, but as I struggled to keep the probe from twisting/flexing, I realized I was going to need to do something that attached both at the top and bottom of the joint. I printed it in two pieces and glued them together, and I also glued them to the shaft that goes though the joint. There’s no removing that thing. I added two zip tie ports so the probe could be fully locked in if need be.

Did it work? Sort of. Through my microscope I can’t see the actual tip, so you have to kind of think “the tip is right below the arc that is the side of the probe,” which kind of sucks. It wouldn’t be a problem if you’re just using an Opto-Visor instead of a scope. I also eventually figured out that my “clever” bar and tilted probe arrangement was reducing the precision multiplier of the pantograph, to something like 2x.

That plus the greater flex from the long probe extension makes the system less ridgid. It works, but the confidence factor/feel are not as good. Sometimes things slip. Another round of design on this one could make it stiffer and also increase the precision multiplier. I’ll have to see. This one is still very much a work in progress.

Maybe it would be smarter to make the piano wire probe into a more real probe in some way? Using 10:1 resistor divider and some coax cable, etc.

What else?

I thought maybe I could lock down the base so it’s easier to probe one handed. The great thing about using a 1/4-20 mounting nut is that I can use any sort of cheap camera mount. Luckily I’d ordered a suction cup mount when I’d gotten the ball mounts, so I was ready to give it a try.

The bad news is it’s hard to get your board in close enough with all those suction cups taking up space. The good news is that one-handed operation is reasonable with this setup. Two-handed usage makes it easier to hop large distances, and feels a bit more fluid but one-handed works.

I tried using my Third Hand to hold the probe locked on some test point, but it was infuriating. It really just didn’t work at all. Trying to position it was a mystery of over shooting and undershooting. A true fail. I was beginning to think maybe a fully locked test point wasn’t going to be a thing I’d be able to do. Then I realized I was over thinking the problem. I discovered that with a bit of technique you could lock the ball joint with the probe just a bit above where you wanted it, and then you could position it and the weight of the probe would hold it in place. Woot! Now you don’t exactly want to dribble a basket ball next to the “locked” probe, but it’s better than “you can’t do that,” and for bigger/safer test targets like a via I’d say it is safe enough. Still the rig is kind of huge. Maybe a smaller suction cup base would make it a lot better.

What’s next? Maybe an Exact-O blade tip for cutting traces? A higher precision multiplier one for people with shaky hands? A Dremel tool holding one? A soldering iron one? I think there are a lot of other good ideas hovering around this one. Build yourself a Pantoprobe. Give it a try. You won’t regret it!

Where do you go from here?

I feel like this is an important invention. Looking around, I didn’t see anyone making a product like this which is kind of crazy.   So I’ve done a lot of work to get the word out. I have the basic PantoProbe models on github. I made a video explaining the probe and another showing you how to  assemble one.  I set up pantoprobe.com to have a central place to point people, and where people can share ideas.

After building quite a few of these probes I also realized that there should be a simpler version of the probe that doesn’t have the complicated joints.  A very simple flexure based model.  So I developed the PantoFlex.  It doesn’t have the same range of motion as a full on probe, but it is almost trivial to print and use.  I also make it come apart so it could be printed on some of the smaller 3D Printers.

PantoFlexParts

Get out there and try one!

 

Cutting 3D Shapes on a Laser Cutter

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twoKnightsWhen my local TechShop got a 120-Watt Epilog Fusion laser cutter, I knew it was time to try out something new. Being able to cut though fairly thick material made me wonder if it was possible to cut out 3D objects with the laser. Most laser cutters produce 2D output. They either cut and etch sheets of material in X & Y, or they cut and etch cylindrical objects (drinking glasses, etc) by turning them with a rotary axis which replaces the Y motion. In the past, I’ve sometimes used an indexing jig to turn the object and make XY cutting passes at various angles. What if I automated this rotation? Could I produce a 3D object by rotating the object and cutting out various 2D silhouette profiles? The process is limited buy the max cutting thickness of the laser. You can’t hack an object out of a spinning 2″ rod of material if the max you can cut though is 1/4″.

The new 120-Watt laser seemed like it might be powerful enough make this idea practical.  I’d never seen anyone do this sort of work with a standard laser cutter. In industry, it’s common to add additional axes to cut at angles, but this XY plus rotational axis (A) was hard to google for. I liked the general shape of the project. At first, I could make a simple rotational jig and manually run a profile cuts though the laser just to see if there was any hope for the idea. If it seemed like it was possible, I could build a motorized A axis and use an optical sensor to sync it to the laser’s motion. From there, all sorts of interesting things could be done in the software to improve the output.

Hey we were featured on Hack-A-Day!

I find a partner in crime

I was pretty excited about the project, and I knew it was going to involve a fair amount of software and hardware. I wrote a super long email to my friend Lawrence pitching the idea. A few hours later he sent me an animated gif of a test model’s rotating silhouette. Clearly, he was in and already on the case! Woot! Lawrence and I have done a number of projects together, including the solar plotter project. He’s great to work with. I knew that with him on board, this project might really have some legs.
Right at this point, my TechShop announced that they were moving to a new location. The laser was going to be unavailable for a few weeks, so I decided to skip ahead and build a motorized A axis. This might’ve seemed overzealous. Why not do some tests with a manual jig first? Well, I was excited about the project and wanted to start building. As an added bonus, building the motorized version would get me to finally troubleshoot the PCB’s I’d designed for my motorized camera rig.

chuckAndShaftFiguring out what was wrong with that PCB would advance that project even if the laser project crashed and burned. So it wasn’t that big a risk to jump ahead, and I was VERY eager to get building. I ordered a cute little 3 jaw chuck so the motorized axis would be able to hold cylindrical stock of various sizes. The only down side to the chuck was that I’d have to machine a shaft with a very concentric 1mm thread. Not a big deal, but an additional hurdle for other folks wanting to build a rig like this.

I did write up that machining job, mostly so I’ll have something to refer to the next time I need to do single point threading.

DSC01277The rig is direct drive using a stepper motor, a zero backlash coupling, and two 608 skateboard bearings.  As Lawrence worked on a way to extract the silhouette profile curves and export them as .svg files, I worked on the most basic version of the device. I used an Arduino Nano and a little stepper motor controller all wired up a on protoboard with a button to advance 1/16th of a turn.
Chuck Stand Looks Like MonstersWhen TechShop reopened, I lasercut the rig to hold the motor, bearings, and chuck so I could glue it together. Lawrence had gotten his profile curve extraction code working, so we were finally ready to do a basic test of the idea.

twoButtonProtoboardInstead of having a fully automated cut-out in these initial tests, the idea was to export each of the profiles as their own print job. We could print them out manually pressing the advance 1/16 button between each file.

Here you can see our very hairy initial setup. The Arduino Nano is in red and the stepper driver in purple. Look Ma, no heat sink!

The First Night

FirstKnightSpinSmallOur initial test model was a chess knight. We started by chucking in a 3″ length of 1″ poplar dowel into the motorized chuck. We figured we could keep printing the same profile until we cut all the way though and then hit the advance button and move on to the next profile. One cut, 2 cuts, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8,9,10,11, finally it cut though. That was a lot of cuts. The wood was pretty charred. We knew the subsequent cuts would be quicker because of all the material removed by that first huge cut, so we continued on. Lawrence loaded, configured, and printed each of the profile cuts, and I opened up the laser, pressed the advance button, closed it back up, and fired off the next cut. Like a pair of bureaucratic button-pushing relay racers, we finally made it to the finish line. The results? The knight was pretty charred and battle scarred. His ears burnt entirely away, but he was recognizably a knight! We were jubilant.

The Second Night

Knight Focal Plane

One of the reasons the laser was taking so many passes was that the thick material had a lot of material far from the focal plane, and that meant more charring and less cutting from the laser.  We realized that although we couldn’t move the model vertically, we could have the focal point above the center of the model, and then by rotating 180 deg and cutting the mirror image of the profile we could effectively cut the same profile with the laser focus at two different levels.

knightSpinSmallSo I added a button to the rig that would rotate the model 180 deg. The first time we tried to cut the mirrored profile after 180 deg rotation, we discovered that the laser’s idea of the center of rotation was off from ours.  We needed to measure and adjust for the offset. After compensating for that, offset the idea worked. We once again did the tag-team cutting process, this time with a somewhat more complicated sequence of rotations that we checked off on a list. By the end of the night, we’d managed to cut out a less charred and scared knight! We even had some ear nubs! We were getting better step by step.

Can you use acrylic rod?

We did try this system on acrylic. Acrylic cuts very cleanly with no charring, and we thought it might have great results, but the process really depends on chunks of material being able to fall away. However, when slowly cut, thick acrylic has the tendency to melt just enough to make the chunks stick and not fall away. We decided to focus on wood for now, with the idea of revisiting acrylic at a later date.

Process Improvements

What were the next big steps? We realized that with better path planning, we could cut thin layers off the side of the rod in multiple passes to minimize the thickness we needed to cut at any one time. This spiraling-in process would allow us to cut each outline only once. We also wanted to add some cut lines to the outside edge of the material so the cut chunks would drop away more easily. Lawrence worked on those things, while I worked on building some sort of laser sensor so we could automate the rotary axis motions. Sitting around with a checklists pushing buttons was not a viable way to be doing this with ever-more-complicated cut sequences.

pcbWithRemoteI built a better two-button remote from some PVC, so we could at least not have to open the laser between passes. I also finally got around to troubleshooting the PCBs I’d had made for the camera motion rig. It turns out the Arduino Nano package I’d downloaded from the internet was for V2 of the Nano, but I had V3. For some unknown reason, they had reversed the order of the analog pins, which is a fatal change if you’re using most of the analog pins for digital IO.  Once I had that fixed in software, the board was only 1 oops wire away from being fully functional, so in an evening I was able to go from hairy protoboard to svelte PCB.

centeringJigI also made a centering jig that made it easy to put the rods into the chuck nicely centered. That way I could quickly chuck new rods without quite as much tapping and fiddling to get them to spin without a wobble. The next big improvement was a way to automatically advance the rig though its rotations as the laser went through its sequence. It would be so nice to be able to just hit “print” and have this system cut out a 3D model.

Blind to the Laser

My first inclination was to use some sort of IR photo transistor to watch the laser pulses and get a sense for when the laser was on versus off, and from there we could keep track of where we were in the sequence and when to advance. We could also in theory eventually use a sequence of laser flashes to communicate rotation sequence information to the rig. That way a single print job could handle everything. There was just one BIG problem with this idea, but thus far I was blind to it.

laserAndScope I built an ATTiny85-based pulse train detector and put it in the laser bed. No reaction. I tried some other random IR photodiodes/transistors I had around.  Still no dice. I hooked up a scope and saw zero evidence of the detector seeing the laser at all! I thought maybe the pulses were just so short that the system couldn’t see them, but then I did some more research. It turned out that the IR emitted by a big CO2 laser is totally out of the range of cheap IR phototransistors. In fact, room temperature versions of such devices had only recently become available and they were $800 used on eBay! Not an option for us. It’s counter intuitive that something so powerful that you can be blinded by even diffuse refection of its light can be entirely undetectable by cheap electronics, but there it was. I’d taken the project up a bind alley.

Acorn Nut Job

acornNutAndThermistorMy backup plan was to use a thermistor armored in a small acorn nut.  The reaction time would be quite slow, but it was simple. The acorn nut would protect the thermistor, and we could make the cutting sequence include having the laser blast the thermistor whenever the rotation rig was supposed to go to the next position. Hopefully, it wouldn’t get too hot over time.

 

acornNutAndPuttyI used a dab of heat-sinking compound on the tip of the thermistor and a glob of epoxy putty to turn the delicate glass thermistor into an armored frankensensor.  When I measured across the terminals to make sure I hadn’t shorted them out I noticed the thermistor value was drifting.   I was seeing the temperature rise of the epoxy setting!  So that was working.

This slow sensor did mean we were going to need a different way to load sequences into the rotation rig. There was no way a system like this was fast enough to communicate a sequence of angles. Luckily, I had another way of doing this. My motorized camera rig used Bluetooth LE to communicate wirelessly to an app on my phone. It’s only 9600 baud, but it works well and lets you have all a full-on user interface running on a device you already have in your pocket. Much better than my huge PVC-wired remote. Best of all, I had already written an app that scanned and connected to this kind of bluetooth device, so I was able to quickly hack that up into an app to control the rig. An iOS app isn’t really that open though, so I was kind of sad to be adding this particular step to our tool chain. I gave the app the ability to receive sequences via deep link.

The Biggest Problem

knightProfilesWe had, however, discovered a huge problem with our plan, a problem that was going to take weeks to resolve. I had been told by someone at TechShop that if you turned off “Smart Vector Sorting” in the lasers print dialog, the laser would output the vectors from back to front. Perfect! We could output SVG, import into Illustrator, and print it out. Sadly, that turned out to not be true. In fact, the order in which the vectors are cut out is entirely out of your control.   #%@$#! The vectors seem to be roughly y sorted and that’s that. God help you if you want to cut a zillion curves that are all in the same place. I exchanged emails with folks at Epilog with no real help. This is not exactly a big priority for folks using  a laser in its normal 2D capacity. For a little while, we worked around this by having one super long cut vector, but that was never going to work for models with holes, etc.

We noticed a project called Ctrl-Cut on Git Hub that was a third party laser control program for the Epilog Legend 36EXT.  Perhaps we could get it to work for the Fusion 120? I contacted Amir, and he was super helpful and generous with his time. I output various print files for him to look at, and he tried making a special cut of Ctrl-Cut for the Fusion 120 which would output the vectors in order. Progress was slow since I could only get on the laser one night a week. The printer files he was generating still had some issues and would crash the laser, which was pretty scary. Meanwhile, in the background, Lawrence was picking though the raw printer output and trying to get his path planning scripts to output the printers .prn files directly. Eventually, Lawrence was successful and he was able to generate .prn files, and we could  even change the speed and power settings between cuts in the same file. Awesome! For this, I hereby award Lawrence an honorary knighthood, and a special shout out to Amir for his help and ctrl-cut examples.

Raster mode awesomeness

knightWithTestRasterOne of the shortcomings of the system of cutting out a bunch of profiles is that you can’t get details that never appear on the silhouette edge of the model. Laser cutters have a “raster” mode where they sweep back and forth quickly and etch an image into the surface. The power of the laser at any point is modulated by the color of an input image. Because this is used to etch a bass relief, I knew it could be used to carve in details which were missed by the profile-cutting passes.

There were details I wanted to be able to faithfully reproduce in the wood, like the eye of the horse and the curve in behind the jaw. I hand drew a few details and tried applying them to the side of one our burnt knights.

To our surprise, the raster pass not only etched in the details, it also blasted away the surface material charred by the slower vector cutting passes. We realized that we may well be able to have entirely non-charred output by simply leaving a thin layer of extra wood on the surface and removing it later with a raster pass.

 

KnightHullRenderingrasterExample

I had a feeling we could use these raster adjustments to cut out a model very close to the shape of the original model. I really wanted to see that in action, so I learned a bit of Scene Kit and wrote a quick system that could draw all the laser cutting passes as geometry, and then fire rays though them to find the distance from the closest hull to the model. This distance controls the darkness of that pixel in the raster image, which in turn controls the amount of material removed by the laser. This was going to be great!

There was just one problem. On closer inspection of our knight model, I realized that it didn’t have much in the way of eye or nostril detail. They were just painted on in textures and not modeled into the surface at all! This fancy ray tracing system was going to be very useful with our not very detailed model. Not wanting to abandon the knight, I cast around for help. I don’t have much in the way of modeling chops, so I knew touching up our model was way beyond me. Having spent more that 8 years as an R&D developer at PDI Dreamworks, I had a few contacts who were up to the task. After asking around for help, Joshua West stepped up and entirely remodeled the knight for us! My Hero! So it was back to the races, armed with his slick new model. I used my rendering system to render out a Visual Hull To Model Offset Map or “Stripy Horse Picture.”

horseRightPass1Now we were talking! You can see how the inner ear, eye, mouth, and nostril are all represented. You can see how the raster is compensating for the faceting of the round base and the deep inset under the jaw, etc. I’d had this image in my head for months, and finally I had it rendered out where other people could see it. Now to see what happens when we apply it to one of our scorched and faceted knights.

Meanwhile, Lawrence had started porting his path planning code to a web app that turned out to be both much faster and more convenient than the python scrip we had been using. We were about to try a number of firsts all in one night. Our first fully automated cutting of the model with the thermal-switch advancing the rotary rig. Our first use of the new speedier web app for path planning and our first (admittedly hand aligned) attempt at fine tuning the model with a automatically generated raster pass.

We had a few false starts: I had to add even more averaging of the thermal sensor to smooth out motor noise that was causing false triggers, and Lawrence had to add back in the “burn a line on the thermal sensor” path segments which had gotten left behind in the port. We managed to get the thing cut out and rastered up, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t look pretty darn good!

firstRasterPassKnight improvedKnightModel

You can see the eye detail, nostril, the jaw line, even the inside of the ear came out! We were ecstatic. There it was, 3D model to wooden model in only a few minutes worth of laser time! The dark lines on the model are actually the places where the model wasn’t touched by the raster pass. Kind of the negative of the dark lines in my rendering. I think, with the addition of a small amount of protective material left on for the raster pass to remove, we should be able to have a mostly-not-burnt looking knight.

We were so excited that we cut out another one, and when that came out we decided to go for broke and cut out a long DNA-shaped helix model. It was our first attempt at a model other than the knight. It was looking pretty neat, but near the end the thermal sensor missed one of the rotation signals. The final pass cut the twisted ladder away, rung by rung, until there was nothing left.  Oops.

If you’d like to see the code, and the PCB designs you can check them out on github.

 

 

 

 

 

Getting Printed Circuit Boards Fabricated

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Close Up Of Nano And BLEI’ve been making progress on the camera motion rig, but it is a not very portable mass of protoboards, wires, alligator clips, and bench-top power supplies.  It works, but it took me 15 minutes just to move it from one table to another.  At this point in a project, you have a few options. You can solder the components onto some perfboard and direct wire up all the connections.  That’s nice and immediate and makes it fairly rugged, but what you end up with is an ugly one-off board. Another option is to make a printed circuit board.  I’ve been etching them since the days of rub off letters/pads/traces, when I’d spend hours with an Exact-o knife and a rubbing stylus. Then for years, I used various toner transfer methods.  These methods let you print your design out on a laser printer, and then transfer the toner onto a copper clad board.  The toner acts as the resist and you etch away the rest of the copper.   Finally, a process where making the second board was a lot simpler than making the first one.  Still it was a pain because getting super clear transfers is a bit tricky, and aligning a second layer is a pain.  You spend a lot of time touching things up.   On the bright side, you can have the board the very same day.  I’ve been doing this for years, but the price of getting PCB’s made has been dropping and dropping.  So I finally decided to have the PCB’s for the camera control rig commercially made. Bluetooth Breakout Board FootprintI downloaded the free version of Eagle CAD. It lets you design boards with some limitations in terms of size and number of layers, but it seemed like it would work for me and, hey, it’s free.  Jeremy Blum has a nice set of video tutorials about the basics of Eagle CAD. My project is a little strange for a first attempt at a board because it is made up of a number of individual daughter boards.  There’s the Arduino Nano, the Bluetooth Break Out Board, and the stepper motor driver board.  Instead of starting by plopping down standard library components, I had to dive right in the deep end and start defining my own custom components.  Sparkfun has a bunch of good Eagle tutorials, including one that walked me though making my own part.  I spent the entire first evening just making the two missing devices.  That tutorial is really aimed at surface mount devices so I kind of had to wing the though hole part. Stepper Motor Driver FootprintEvery device has a symbol which is what shows up in the schematic, and one or more packages which match the physical shape of the device.  So for example a 555 timer chip has a single schematic symbol, but then can come in a tiny surface mount package, or a much bigger through hole version.  I was so exited when I finally got to the stage of being able to plop down my three main components and wire them together. On the second night I wired up the rest of the schematic.  That would normally be fast, but as you add components you have to always pick exactly which physical component you’re going to use.  It’s not just 100uF Capacitor, it’s a 100uF Capacitor with radial 3.5mm though hole pads and 8mm spacing.  Thankfully I was only using one resistor type, two types of capacitors, and two kinds of connectors.  So it took a while, but not crazy amount of additional time.  I think onece you have sort of built up a arsenal of devices you tend to use in projects that part will be much faster and less painful.

Screen Shot 2014-05-10 at 8.52.03 PM

Final Schematic

By the end of that evening I had wired everything up.  I noticed I still had some unused Arduino pins.  So I added a tri color status led, and a voltage divider so I could monitor the 12 volt supply in case it was being driven from a battery.  That way  I could support a low battery warnings, etc.  I also pushed the last few pins out to an aux port so I could add things like an external trigger button or jog knob later if needed.  Then I was ready to take a stab at routing the board.

Screen Shot 2014-05-10 at 9.24.56 PM

Footprint Problems

It was then that I saw various problems with my hand built parts.  I’d manually put holes though the pads which was redundant and was also causing an exclusion zone around those pins.  My ground plane was avoiding those pins like the plage.   Heck even the Nano part lib I’d downloaded had to have the corner dill holes removed. Also my extensive naming of things had really cluttered up my silk screen layer, and Eagle’s Smash Part command which lets you move the name/value around independently wouldn’t let me move those silk screens around.  *sigh* Screen Shot 2014-05-10 at 8.54.52 PMThe third night I spent reworking my custom devices, beefing up the various power lines,  fiddling around with labels, adding holes for mounting screws, and being generally anal retentive.  I spent a while trying to use Net Classes so the auto router would beef up the supply lines on it’s own, but for some reason it just was not having any effect.  I used the RIPUP; command a lot during that period.  It rips up all the routing on the board.  In the end there were only a few short runs that needed to be really beefy so I just routed them by hand. Ok so the board was mostly ready to go.  Now I had to get the thing built.  You can get Eagle to export GERBER files which define the various layers, have separate files for the layers, holes, solder masks, etc.  All the files need to have the right names and file extensions.  It’s all very fiddly.  Thankfully there are CAM job files you can download that will take various layers in Eagle and spit out a pile of properly named GERBER files.  So it’s a mostly automated process.   Then you zip those files into a single file and you’re ready to try sending them to some board manufacturers.  Jeremy Blum’s third video goes over doing this, and he has a Job file you can use.  His third video has a lot of tedious “putting together a bill of materials” section.  That’s probably the only really bouring thing in his otherwise awesome videos.  If you already know how to select parts (which you practially had to do to decide on parts for your layout) you can skip the middle third of that video. Lady Ada has a page comparing the various manufacturers. OSH Park Board PreviewI decided to try OSH Park first.  Just because I liked the sound of $5 a square inch for three boards and free shipping.  For small boards that seemed ideal.  It turned out all that fiddling around making GERBER files and CAM job messiness was totally unnecessary.  OSH Park takes Eagle board files, and a few seconds later you’re looking at beautifully rendered views of the various layers of your board.  Their boards have both top and bottom silk screens and are purple with gold plated pads.  So swanky.  They quoted me $29 for three boards.  I was so swept away by the simplicity and the nice looking layers that I just fired it off.   I was so excited.  A few minutes later I realized I hadn’t done the one test I had really wanted to do.  Printing out a scale version of the pads and making sure I had all the spacings correct on my home brew parts.  It was late at night at this point but I just HAD to know.   I wasn’t going to sleep well wondering if I’d have to wait 12 days to get 3 pieces of unusable purple and gold junk. Sadly my laptop isn’t connected to a printer so I tried exporting to .pdf and emailing that to myself so I could print  in from our desktop machine.   When I printed it out the sizes where all screwed up.  Either everything was off, or the scale was getting fiddled.  Googling around it sounded like others were having scale problems with pdf’s.  So I saved the file as postscript.  Sent that to myself and then I had to figure out how to send a .ps file to a postscript printer from Windows 7.  You’d think that would be trivial, but you’d be wrong.  I ended up having to install both ghostscript and the gsview postscript viewer before I could finally print  it out.   By then it was well past 1am, but I just HAD to know.  This time it printed out properly.  The pin headers had the right spacing the Nano matched, but horror or horrors the stepper motor driver’s two rows of pins where one step too close together!

Stop the presses!

Thankfully OSH Park batches your job up with a bunch of others so I was able to get them to cancel my board without a hickup.  I’m sure I wasn’t making my best first impression with them.  Oops.  I got up early and reworked that part’s foot print for the second time.  I hand re-routed the power lines again, and soon  I was back looking at the awesome purple eye candy. Screen Shot 2014-05-10 at 8.57.53 PMWould I hit the Buy Button this time?  No.  This time I was a bit more catihous. I noticed that on the actual CAM output of the board they were cutting the ground planes into strips.  That probably helps cut down on eddy current noise or something, but there were a few places where I was depending on that plane to conduct the full motor current.  I decided to go back and direct draw a few fat lines in those areas.   Also there was a place where an important pad had copper removed around the corners to make it easier to solder.  Soldering to a full copper plane is a pain since it skins so much heat.   For this one important pad there were only two small tabs connecting it to the ground plane. I fattened that one up to .056mm hopefully striking a better balance between solderablity and current. New Wider Stance and Wide PadsI also realized that OSH Park includes a bottom silk screen that I hadn’t used at all because I didn’t want to pay for that.   I quickly moved a few notations down to the bottom just so the board would look nicer.  Bottom silk screens are nice because that’s often where you’re poking around with probes trying to trouble shoot things.  Well at least for through hole projects.  Now finally when I was scrutinizing those purple and gold lovelies rendered on the OSH Park site I decided to pull the pin.  There are two capacitor pads that I wish were a bit bigger.  I think they may be hard to solder, but I declare it good enough.  I also experimented with converting the stepper board from normal round pads to the old style wide pads.  This way I can compare solderability. That day we were going to a friends birthday party and Cheryl and I both wore purple and gold to celebrate my first board send off. Now I have to wait 12 days for the boards to show up.  What the heck will I do?  I guess I can try some more time lapses and maybe start work on the enclosure.  Apparently I’m also doing a  blog post.  So far I’ve been very happy with OSH Park.  Their upload and verification stuff is slick and simple.  Since I’m already using Eagle it really could not be easier.  They also let me cancel my one rouge order.  I tried uploading my project to Seeed Studio and their site seemed to be telling me that it would be $9 for 10 boards which has to be wrong but there was no detailed feedback about the order and I couldn’t tell what was wrong.  For prototyping I think OSH Park is worth it.  If  I get to a point where I want to make more than 3 boards I’ll have to try someone else.  Now I just have to hope I haven’t screwed anything else up.  Are the 12 days over yet!?

Building an Arduino based Motorized Camera Rig

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I’ve always wanted to make a time lapse video. It’s like building a machine to catapult forward in time.  What could be more fun?  I really feel like the best time lapse videos integrate camera motion to give the scene an additional compelling dimension. I spent a couple of evenings building a quick and dirty motorized camera slide from a dead inkjet printer. It was a failure.  It was unable to produce the slow steady motion needed for video, much less the kind of control needed for time lapse.  I started to think about what a serious system with substantial time investment would have.  It could be bigger and have at least two-axis camera motion.  It would need a bunch of software with some way of key-framing the camera motion, maybe an LCD display, maybe a pendant control for stepping/snapping frames without jiggling the camera.  What else?  A way to power and auto-trigger the camera for time lapse.  All in all a much, MUCH bigger project.  OK, if that’s the end goal, what’s a good first step? I’m always wary of  physically big projects. As the size goes up, costs go up. Big projects are harder to get into/out of the car, take up more workbench space, and ultimately collect dust in a bigger way.   If I can fit a project into a single project box, life is simpler.

Bigger Motor ControllerSo instead of embarking on a large two- or three-axis rig, I decided to build a very small one-axis rig.  Heck, I already had a small one-axis slide.  This way I could get my feet wet with the software, LCD, motor controllers, and all the other fun stuff, but without as much schlepping. A friend of mine pointed out that a little motorized stage like that could also be used for focus stacking, and he’d been wanting to build a focus stacking rig.   He sent me little linear slide with a stepper motor drive and a tiny ball screw.  I’d never seen a ball screw that small!   It was sweet!  I poked around on Amazon and ordered a A4988-based stepper motor driver the size of a postage stamp.  They were cheap, small, and the data sheet made them sound like they were doing a decent job with the microstepping, which might be useful for very precise focus stacking.  I used to build stepper motor drivers out of discrete components, but it’s unbelievable what you can get these days for not much money. I’ve been itching to try some of the pre-made ones out, so I ordered the stepper motor and a much bigger driver board based on the TB6560, mostly because I was having trouble convincing myself that a driver without a heat sink was really going to be able to do the job. And even the big one was cheap.  It was less than $17,  including two-day shipping to my door. I’d also been wanting to play with some of these cheap LCD displays I see around, so I ordered a 4-line 20-character blue one that Amazon Primed its way to my house for $16. I ordered the blue one because a green-and-black LCD was going to make the project look like it was from the early 90’s.  I ordered one that had an I2C daughter board because I wasn’t sure how many IO pins this project was going to need, and I didn’t really want to burn half of them driving the display. When the display came, I was bummed that they’d shipped me the green and black version, not the blue one!   I set my time machine for the early 90’s and kept moving.  I wired up the display to an Arduino Uno.  I downloaded the Arduino IDE and a library to drive the display.  I wired it up like this:

Screen Shot 2014-04-23 at 8.44.48 PM

Then I ran this exciting bit of code.

#include <Wire.h> 
#include <LiquidCrystal_I2C.h>

//Addr: 0x3F, 20 chars & 4 lines
LiquidCrystal_I2C lcd(0x3F,20,4);

void setup()
{
 lcd.init(); 
 lcd.backlight();
 lcd.setCursor(0, 0);
 lcd.print("Hello World");
}

void loop()
{
}

Two DisplaysThankfully, it just worked.  The text was super crisp and readable.

I was still a bit bummed about the color, so I decided to roll the dice and try ordering the blue display again.  I’d be able to compare the two colors side-by-side and see which one I liked best. This time I did get the blue one. It worked and was crisp and clear.  Our eyes don’t like focusing on dark blue things though, and if I had to be brutally honest I’d have to say that the green display was more readable.  I decided to switch to the blue one anyway.

Special CharactersI wrote a little program to page through all 256 characters that could be sent to the display to see what sorts of special characters might be available.  There were a few useful ones like left and right arrows, the deg symbol, and a solid block character which I might actually use in my interface.

The next step was to put the various parts I was thinking about using together to visualize how things were going to fit.

Component Layout And Sizing

I was originally going to mount everything to the side of the motorized stage so I could cut down on external wiring.  I could even put the end-of-travel sensors inside the project box.  But it was starting to look 10 pounds of project in a 5-lb bag.

The project box was big, and it was going to have to be right under the camera or using it would be uncomfortable and trying to manipulating it would jiggle the camera.  Those issues seemed like deal breakers.  The next plan was to put the control box at some distance from the motor and make a separate control pendant that could plug in.  I’d need OK and Cancel buttons and some sort of spring-loaded pot for jog control.

Remote Jog WheelI went poking around at the local surplus store and scored a VCR remote with a nice spring-loaded jog wheel.  It even had two buttons inside the wheel, so I thought my control pendant problems where over.  I’d wire up the jog wheel/buttons through a phone connector to the main control box, and I’d be all set.  However, when I dissected the remote, I found that the jog wheel was not a pot.  It had 3 digital pins providing gray code position info.  That meant only a few jog speeds in each direction, and it meant I’d need more lines than a standard phone cord.  Back to square one.

Spring Return PotI decided to take a stab at adding my own spring to a pot to make a “return to center” jog controller.  I drilled a hole through the pot’s shaft and bent up a spring.  It worked. After some fiddling, I was able to make it control the motion of the slide.  It had a really sloppy feel to it. The center was always just kind of approximate, and it was harder to turn in one direction than the other.  Kind of a cruddy experience compared to the feel of the remote’s nice jog wheel.  I decided to punt for a while and work on other parts of the project.

End of Travel SensorsI wired up the end-of-travel sensors.  I was using IR gap sensors for a no-contact way of measuring the travel.  Now that the sensors couldn’t be mounted inside the project box, I decided to make them fit inside a bit of metal wiremold that I had lying around.  I used some Bondo to hold the sensors at the correct height and support a phone jack at the end so the sensors could be easily connected up.

This was by far the most annoying part of the entire build.  The phone jacks turned out to be back-stabbing fiends.  Fitting everything in the wiremold was annoying, and I had a wire tear out when I was closing it up.  Then the sensors weren’t working, so I ripped everything apart trying to figure out why. I had accidentally grabbed a two-conductor phone cord even though I’d  purchased a 4-conductor one. Then when I finally figured that out, I failed to realize that when using phone connectors, the wires get flipped from left to right so red on one end becomes green on the other, and black becomes yellow.  *Smack Forehead*  After I figured that out, I thought I was home free, but it still didn’t work.  I finally traced the problem to a poorly designed jack where the connector could clip in, but was still not fully seated and wasn’t making contact.  After that got resolved, everything was fine. But I’d burned an entire afternoon trying to run 4 wires a few feet.

Quick Release Plate MountedI got a super cheap quick-release plate.  When I was taking it out of the packaging, a spring and pin fell right out of the bottom.  I deemed them to be unnecessary and threw them out.  Then I noticed that  the cam lock tends to slowly unscrew and the screw can’t actually be tightened properly without making the cam hard to turn.   A dab of Loctite could solve that.  Hey, it was cheap!  My only regret is that I wasn’t able to mount it so the cam stuck out the same side as the wiremold.  This would have made the whole thing more compact left to right, but that might have required tapping some blind holes, and this way around it was simple to mount.  Just a 1/4-20 though an already existing hole in the carriage.

LCD Rig Wire MessI had all this wired up to an Arduino Nano.  It could jog the motor when I twisted the pot, and it could read the end-of-travel sensors.  Next was to start designing some UI for the LCD.  I played around with being able to highlight various menu options by quickly toggling the solid block character behind them, etc.  It all seemed doable, but it was kind of tedious Arduino development. I kept thinking “How is this going to scale up for multi-axis key frame animation craziness?”

 Massive Feature Creep Occurs

It was then that I noticed Bluetooth LE boards for the Arduino.  Could I control my whole rig from an iPhone app? I could ditch the LCD, buttons, pendants, and all the associated wires and connectors.  I could make the project box smaller.  I could write an iPhone app to do the interface heavy lifting, and I’d only have to do a moderate amount of stuff on the Arduino end of things.  No more planning out of awkward LCD interfaces.  Plus, it just sounded fun!

Blue Tooth ConnectedSo I ordered one of the boards, and I was off to the races. Adafruit’s page about wiring up the board is very clear, and I hooked up an Arduino UNO just to try it out.  I was able to get their UART echo communication going right away.  Simple, Pimple.

The next test would be to write my own program to establish the Bluetooth communications and see if I could use a slider to jog the motor.  I wanted to test the latency and to see if stepper motor switching noise would affect the communications.

The great thing about Bluetooth LE is that you don’t need any special licensing.  I spent one of my precious Wednesday nights ripping the com parts out of the Adafruit example and sticking them into my own simple app.  The app just had a connect/disconnect button, a connection status indicator, and two end-of-travel indicators. The communication is only 9600 baud, so I made a special jog loop the Arduino could go into where the phone would keep sending single bytes of  jog slider info, and a 0 would indicate that the jog portion was done and go back to the main loop.

The very first version wasn’t wired to anything. It would just indicate end-of-travel limits having been reached if you slid the slider close to the end of its travel path.  After tracking down an issue with a rough signed char, I got it working. The latency was quite low.

Jog Actually WorkingNext up: rewire the Nano to remove the LCD/knob and wire in the Bluetooth LE board.  Then I’d be able to jog an actual motor. I powered it up and could hear the motor making some ticking sounds, but jogging wasn’t working.  I went to hook up the scope and bumped the alligator clip that was providing motor power.  It touched something on the board, and the Arduino’s LED’s went out.  Yup, I’d fried the Nano.  Ouch. Oh dear. Had I fried the USB port on my computer?  Apparently not. *phew* No need to panic.   I did not, however, have a spare Nano on hand.  Trying out the jogging was going to have to wait until next week.

Jog On OscilloscopeIn the mean time, I rewired some parts of the protoboard to make it a bit less hairy.  I don’t want accidental short circuits killing things, but I also don’t like clipping the leads on resistors and caps.  When the replacement Nano came, I decided to only connect motor power after I was reasonably sure the other things were working.  I  used the oscilloscope to see if the Nano was producing the expected step pulse trains.

Yup, that seemed to be working.  With some trepidation, I decided to try and hook up motor power again.   Nothing burned out, and it worked!  Next I needed to see if the limit switches worked. I jogged the stage all the way down to the end, and one of my limit indicators on the iPhone started flickering like crazy. But it was the wrong indicator. I swapped near/far sensors and added some software switch debouncing.  The slow linear ramp of the limit sensor was producing a lot of noise when it got close to the logic level boundary.  I’d love to run it into a nice Schmitt Triggered gate.  That would keep the software nice and clean, but if I was going to have PCBs made, it would add area and expense.

I could have made them go-to-analog inputs and just used two thresholds.  That’s probably what I should have done, but  stepping at 1/16 of a step was putting me at 54400 steps per inch, which was really taxing the powers of the accellStepper library and I didn’t want to add much to my inner loop.  That’s probably silly of me and adding two analog reads to my loop wouldn’t matter. Instead, I did digital reads and required a large number of matching consecutive answers before alerting the iPhone. Probably over complicating the code since the real bottleneck in accellStepper is probably its use of millis() not a couple of  analog reads.
Camera On RigNext up was to install CHDK on my camera and see if I could manage to use a USB cable to act as a remote shutter switch.  CHDK runs on various Canon cameras and lets them do things they normally couldn’t.  My camera (a Canon S100) didn’t have a way of remote triggering, so I had to hack it with CHDK  to do that.  You have to make a special bootable SD card.  I used a tool called STICK to analyze a photo taken by my camera, determine the exact firmware in the camera, and download and format a bootable SD card.   This made setting it up simple.  Then I went through a maze of  menus to turn on remote shuttering. I wired one of the Nano’s output pins to my camera’s USB port and wrote a snippet of code to take a picture. It worked! Right now I hold a line high for 1 second, and then it takes a photo when the line goes low. I haven’t tried running a shorter cycle.  Maybe with manual focus/metering it could take photos more quickly.  I haven’t tried.

timeLapseStagetimeLapseSetup

I had motion, I had photo taking. It was time to try and do a time lapse with this rig. I took it over to my son’s Lego studio area and set up a magic crystal garden I’d purchased online.  I used fun-tack and clothespins to aim the rig, plunked an old calendar photo of clouds in the background, and we were almost ready to go.  I set all the camera settings to manual. Then I set the code to move though the system’s full range of motion over 10 hours, taking one frame every 2 minutes for a total film length of 10 seconds.

I waited until it was dark, and I fired off the time lapse.  It felt like Christmas Eve,  and I didn’t know if Santa was going to leave me a time-travel movie or a lump of coal. I told the kids we couldn’t go into the garage for 10 hours. In the morning, I went out to see what had happened.   The first thing I noticed was that one of the big chunks of foam I’d taped up over the garage windows had fallen down during the night.   Oh, oh.  Still, the crystals were fully grown and there were 300 photos on the camera, so it was time to try and play them as a movie.   Unfortunately, iMovie only lets you specify still frames down to 0.1 seconds in length, so you can’t really make a 1/30 of a second one-frame-per-image movie.  Argh!  Photoshop can do it, but that requires loading all the frames into layers. On my machine, loading in 300 big 3000×4000 pixel images was taking for-ev-er.   Finally, I just downloaded some freeware frame encoding tool and used that to build my time lapse.  Then I could use iMovie to add title, fiddle with the sound, etc.  By 11am, I’d finally managed to unwrap My First Time Lapse.  It was over-exposed and didn’t have great focus, but the kids thought it was cool.  Success!

 

crystalsFinalState

 

Making the Gandalf Costume

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Pioneer wanted to be Gandalf The White for Halloween.  I had made Gandalf’s sword, but I still needed to make his cloak and hat. In the run-up to Halloween, I’d spent most of my time working on Simon’s King Cobra costume, and then I got sick. In the end, I had to design and sew together Pioneer’s Gandalf hat and cloak in 4 hours on Halloween Eve. I couldn’t even work late into the night because I was still recovering. Thankfully, I’d already purchased the fabric to make the costume. So it was strictly an evening of Design & Build. I set up a folding table in the guest bedroom to act as my sewing room so I wouldn’t have to commute over the hill to TechShop. TechShop is awesome for sewing projects because I can spread out on three tables and there’s good lighting and an ironing board and iron. I still use my own sewing machine because that’s what I’m used to. So working upstairs wouldn’t be that much of a step down, and hopefully I wouldn’t have to iron.

Gandalf Costume PatternI decided to go very simple. I only made two paper patterns. One was for half of the arm and another for the back, which doubled as the front sides. Only two pieces of paper! Simple Pimple. Ok, there were also two piece of paper for the hat. The advantage of working at home was I could actually size the thing to Pioneer’s body instead of snagging a shirt/pants and sizing from that.

Gandalf Costume PinnedI cut, pinned, sewed, and hemmed like crazy. The only things I put on the cloak above the bare minimum were some belt loops, a sword loop, and an extra layer across the back in the shoulder blades area. I’m not even sure what that’s called on a cloak. I should have double-checked the sword loop height because that ended up being a bit low, and the sword was going to be dragging its tip. Thankfully, the belt loop was big enough to double as the sword loop and the dragging sword crisis was averted.

Gandalf HatI had designed the hat with two intersecting cones of paper. Making the inner cone was trivial, but attaching the brim cone piece at just the right position so it wouldn’t kink the inner cone ended up taking three attempts. This was complicated by the fact that I was also pinning in a hat band, so the actual pinning was stupidly time consuming. Finally I got it just right. Before I sewed the hat together, I took one last look and realized that I had pinned the inner cone in inside out! Horror! I was going to have to pin it again, or the seam allowance would be on the outside of the hat. Not …. enough ….. time. I made an executive decision. I sewed it up the way it was, trimmed the seam allowance very close to the seam, re-inverted the hat and did another seam. That way it looked nice both on the inside and the outside, and the only evidence of my mistake was a little bit of cloth sticking out in the hat band area. Later someone told me this was called a “French Seam.” Funny that I made that up as a time-saving measure.  I really should take some kind of sewing class.

Pioneer looked good in his costume.  Perhaps the hat could have been a bit bigger and stiffer, and the sword loop should have been higher, but basically it came out fine.  Mission accomplished.

PioneerAsGandalf  gandalfDrawsHisSword

GandalfShowsOffGlamdring  GandalfNoHat

Pioneer insisted that I take a photo of him falling into the pit with the Balrog.   Here is the photo after massive amounts of photoshop fiddling to make it really look like he is falling.   Maybe I should have tried a bit harder…  I also avoided mentioning that Gandalf the Gray was the one who actually said “You cannot pass!”  It’s best not to contradict the  wielder of the flame of Anor.

GandalfFallingIntoThePit