IDLE HANDS

So I have made a little drone/noise app for my own amusement, and it turned out very good. Now I’m thinking of letting it out into the wild on the appstore.

Two things I’m uncertain about thou.

Should it have a .99 or 99 dollar price-tag? If it was circuitbent or made from scratch it would take me the same amount of time (except for the oscillator in this thing, I hardly think it’s makable analogwise) putting it together. I could make the next one a little faster, but not by the factor it takes to let someone download it of the app store. Another factor for the price is the availability, is there a market great enough for a .99 noise-drone app? Will it increase the value for the buyer if s/he pay’s more? What’s your take on this?

Second thing I’m thinking about is the look, right now it uses standard widgets and no special graphics at all. Where it boutique or circuit-bent it would have a distinct look of it being either hand-made or hand-altered. So should one try and make something more nifty?

This is how it looks today, soon there will be audio examples as well!

Lasers are cool, and so are CNC machines.

With a little help from ebay and Jesper I have a steady reliable laser module that I have mounted on my CNC machine.
The laser is always on (I’m gonna fix that) and the color is in a spectrum that is not visible by humans, the good news is that it is visible by my iPhone. So I shot a little video:

You can see the light emitting from the laser LED and at the end you see the result of the laser. man oh man will this be fun to play around with.

The cooling seems to work as well!

This is exciting!

I discovered last pic standing yesterday. it’s a site where everyone can upload a picture, that picture overwrites the old picture.

I wish I thought of this.

Anyway, I’m home sick, and reloading that page was the best fun I had. It’s a bit like lottery.
Mild disappointment when there is no new image.
Real bad disappointment when there is a new and bad image.
Terrible disappointment when the site is down because of all the reloaders out there.
Great success when there is a new and good picture.

Anyways I need to get some sleep but I don’t want to miss out on any image, so I installed wget on my mac.

then I wrote this little script to download all new images:

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
wget -A gif,jpg,png -r -nc http://www.lastpicstanding.com/index/
sleep 5
done


Now I can get some sleep, and I will only miss images that are less then 5 seconds apart, perhaps I should lower that amount, but lets be nice to that server!

So, another day, another CNC-post.
today I’m gonna post my “plotter” processing script.
It takes an image and makes lines where the color is black, and nothing for the rest.

To illustrate this I have a picture of Frank from Donnie Darko.

Scary as always 🙂 After a lite “shopping” he looks like this:
much easier for the processing script to make lines of. Speaking of witch, this is the preview from my processing script:

Here is the script: CNC_Plotter.pde in case you want to generate your own gcode to run on your own CNC machine. Awesome right.

Yes, this post is very similar to http://www.larsby.com/johan/?p=771

Anyways here is the final result. Made with an engraver bit on plywood I’m not going deep enough to get to the next layer. No inception style stuff here at all!

Here is the output, minus lacquer and with a Swedish 1 krona for size reference!

So, today I’m gonna show you how I use my CNC for more then making it.

First we need a motif.
I searched the internets for a picture of something pretty or cool, then I stumbled upon this image of Scarlett Johansson.
Then you need to pre-process it a bit, I removed all the things that where not Scarlet, then used the threshold function go get it black and white and finally I cut it out all the white that I didnt really need.

Cutting out that stuff also makes it easier to align and size up whatever I’m going to drill in. Now it’s time to use a processing script I originally wrote to generate svg-codes. It now generates gcodes (aswell as an image). One thing to remember is that you need to be careful of whatever size you’re drillbit is, it’s easy to get exited and start to soon. A bit of calm thinking and checking the spacing between the holes is needed.

fx: between  Y6.0, X44.4 and  Y6.0, X45.6 is 1.2mm difference. that is fine if you have like, half a mm sized drillbit. I don’t want that small so I’m tweaking the processing script. This particular time it came down to 2878 holes.

This is how the preview looks:

Right now the CNC is drilling holes in a piece of paper that I’m gonna put into a frame I bought at IKEA. I’ve noticed that It sometimes get’s a bit stupid and tries to take the shortest way to a point that I have not told it to go to. Guess I have to remake more of the source, or perhaps rewrite it. I never use the circle part anyway’s. perhaps a bezier addition could be nice? anyway’s here is a little video of the machine drilling away, not very interesting to watch.

Of course I managed to move the paper around when I should not, crap. And I’ve noticed that the spindle sometimes takes the closes way to a point I haven’t even specified. Guess I have to take a look at that arduino code again. But I’ll wait until I get a laser up and running!

As you can see from this final photo I had to stop it since it started to tear things apart. I really got to fix that bug. So I wont put light’s behind either. I’ll probably throw it away soon. But still It’s good to document things once in a while!

Finally here’s the processing source: CNC_Director

Of course I needed a little program to send gcodes to my arduino that controles the engines.

That was pretty simple since I already had serial connection code up and running.

this is how it looks:

the -X and X moves 1cm to the left and right. the small x’s move a mm. The y’s and the z’s move in other direction.

Connect connects to the arduino, disconnect does the opposite.

set home set’s the home position, the start position of a program, go home travels to that position

start and stop starts and stops the program that is written on the left, the right outputs status information.

The icon was found on 4chan.

Here is the source if you’re interested: CNC_kontroller

I know these post are getting norm here, especialy the tecnology part of it. Soon though I’ll post a video of the CNC making something.

But this post is about the arduino code I modified to controll the motors. I was going to try more then the reprap old old old gcode interpreter, but I never got further. It’s really booring to configure motor drivers.

Anyways, reprap has a gcode interpreter, I dont really remember all the problems or the modifications that I made. but here are some:

The motors and turnstep had to be configured for the V90.
Inverted angles are the best angles.
Feed speed did not work dunno why, something with the motors.
Turning the motors of did not work, or rather, turning them on again failed.
I removed all endstop triggers, did not connect those.
Fixed the existing feedrate, and added my own 🙂
Added more comment ignore-code.

That’s about it I guess.

GCode_Interpreter_LARSBY

I made a CNC machine, a mill, CNC stands for Computed Numerically Controlled, so it’s a mill I can control with my computer. You already knew this of course.

So why would someone of my rockstar status and charisma take on such a nerdish task? Well when I first really saw one was a water-jet cutter on Discovery’s Orange County Chopper – TV show. I was thrilled, making stuff at home, awesome. Then the whole etsy and ponoko thing came along and as you know I tried the www.cutyourway.com service, but a week’s turnaround was a bit to much, and I got a blooded teeth and wanted more, and faster. Then I saw that you could make your own PCB’s with it by drilling away excessive copper instead of etching with chemicals and stuff.

Around the time I ordered my Pandora , my friend Göran Hane ordered one, I was supposed to use his (and help pay for it) but it hasn’t arrived to him yet. We have a bet as for who will get his first. He his CNC or me my Pandora. Anyway, sorry Göran.

So enough about the why and on to the how.
I did a lot of research, I looked at a lot of machines, _a lot_ but price, size and reliability really gave me only one choice, the Probotix v90. It’s big, it has great support if one should need it. It’s not made of steel and that put me of a bit in the beginning, because I was afraid that it would not be exact enough. But as far as I can tell, that is not a problem.

Shortly before ordering it though, I found out that one had to use a windows or Linux computer to control it, since it needed a parallel port from a stationary computer. Now I’m all mac at home. And I really didn’t want a stupid old big windows or Linux machine running again. Besides I tried out both emc2 and whatever the windows like program is called in virtualbox on my mac. They where both slow and ugly. Not something I’d want to run. And nothing I’d sacrifice my ability to say “I’m only running Mac’s at home”

So I turned (once again) to the Arduino, I found some gcode parsers (g-code is control language that you save stuff in as to control your machine). Normally the parsing and such is done on the computer, and then only sent as instructions to the motors. I then also re-discovered the makerbot. The makerbot works with extruding plastic, so that you can make small plastic parts. However, it works in 3 axis and it’s controlled by an Arduino. Great, I ordered 3 controllers (one for each axis) and 3 motors from the makerbot store.

While I was waiting for everything to arrive I started looking at the source code for different stuff, to save time when the stuff arrived. Everything arrived the afternoon before I went to the Norbergfestival. Wise from earlier experiences I let everything stay in their boxes. not even opening them a little. And when I came back I went back to work from vacation so I had to go to bed early on account of being tired. SO it took me a couple of day’s before I started.

The mechanic part of the CNC, the Probotix V90 took about 2 hours to put together, easy as Sunday morning. I did that in an afternoon. The motors and controllers where more tricky. putting together. Not the actual soldering or anything like that. Just that there where errors in the gcode setting up of the motors. And the imperial tester (a little arduino program that play’s the imperial march (from star-wars) on a stepper motor) did not work out of the box. I was afraid it was me, but it was the source. I did some workarounds with the timers and delay-times and such and I got it running. (hooray).

I’m missing one hump though. You have to use higher current to feed your motors with then the arduino can deliver. The makerbot uses an ATX power-supply for this. I took one from one of the old computer I have in the basement, but none would start. Turns out you have to modify them (or short circuit rather) to keep them running. That made me sweat a bit, since I’m rather afraid of everything above 9v. But it went well.

Then disaster struck. As I was fiddling around making software adjustments one solder came of, and it was for one of the motors. The controller for that engine started smoking and there where some sparks. The controller was completely dead. So I had to order a new one. Stupid mistake that cost me 30+35 dollars extra (not added in the table below)

In the two weeks I had before the new one came along I’ve managed to:
* Fine tune the arduino system so that it is completely as it should. or at least works like I want it to.
* Make an OS X program that feeds the arduino with gcodes (I tried replicatorg but it wouldn’t send stuff to the Arduino, I also tried to make a program in processing, but I could not find a text-field input UI component, so objective-c it was)
* I remade my processing sketch that I used to generate SVG’s for cutyourway to spit out gcode instead
* I made a path-finder from bitmap to gcode program so I can cut shapes

Why did I write those programs you ask? well, because I wanted them to do specific things. The inkscape svg-out plugins I found where really not all there, at least not in the functionality that I wanted. The best was the phlatprinter guy’s sketch-up plugins.  But it was not very cunning on freehand-shapes. I programmed some ruby (or rather modified an existing script) so that it worked. But the svg co-ordinate system and all the transforms and matrix magic made my head hurt.

What am I then using to cut stuff with? well, a Dremel 300 and some drill bits, perhaps later I’ll get a better mill with higher RPM. I’ve actually already started to collect stuff to build a laser-cutter. MOHAHAHAHA, time to die Mr Bond!

I’m going to post all the programs with source one by one and with further instructions on how to use them, this blog is simply about why I built a  CNC machine, and what it cost me, and what I learned. More detail later.

Here is a little table on about what I paid.

So I went to that the Norbergfestival again, with Linus, Petter and Sållet.

I had fun, Hecate was entertaining, as was Dj Gay’s Anatomy. Zabutom makes much better gig’s when he’s not drunk on alcohol I tricked him into drinking. Teenage Engineering was supposed to let us feel the OP-1, but they where to busy playing on them themselves and dressing in drag. Goto80 has a new project, called labellbl or something. Every song is a new genre. Funny. He and Rakel where there. It was nice meeting them again. It was also nice meeting Ola Skrolla with his crew. He made visuals för Zabbe. Hollowman of FLT was there to, good stuff I really like him.

Me and Petter failed to get a spot at the open stage for our pigfart project. Then we planned to have a go at playing at the parking with the car’s soundsystem as soundsystem. We failed that to. Petter made a little noise at the camp though. But I did not even unpack my stuff or bring them out of the car. But hey, a cancelled gig is also a gig!

Linny Hex had a dancer/friend with her. Funny/strange to see someones entourage like that. While sitting in my camping-chair in my party-tent I saw two strangers do a drug transaction. I later found out it was Extacy. DJ Gay’s anatomy  had a dancer with her. The girls in the audience grinded themselves on each other. Hecate showed one of her tit’s. She also yelled at the soundguy when he turned the sound of because she went over her allotted spot. She was out on the camp partying later so … I guess she wasn’t that mad.

I’ll see you there next year?

Ok, so I went to bed at about 12, but my wife has to get up at five in the morning didn’t want me to read in bed. So I went downstairs to read for a while.

I thought the dog was to loud when she was drinking water out of the bowl until I went to check, the kitchen tap was busted and wouldn’t be shut of.
So I turned of the water to the who building and sent an sms to my wife telling her what had happened (I was to tired to get pen and paper). At about three in the morning one of the neighbors thinks it’s a good idea to start a party, so he carried all his speakers outside and started blasting music. I didn’t wake up until my wife went up to close the door and go to the bathroom. I went downstairs to the basement to turn the water on so she could wash her hands. Then I turned it of again and tried to go to sleep. but it was to hot (because we had to have the windows closed) so I couldn’t go back to sleep.
at about four thirty I went downstairs and fell asleep on a hard kitchen-couch. then I woke at nine from Lukas sitting on me.

I tried to fix the kitchen tap with a new replacement tap that I had from before (I was gonna change it anyways) but all I managed was to make it leak into the basement.

So I put that on hold and went with the kids to the auto-shop, you see, they replaced the fuel-pump last week, but this Monday when I filled the tank I noticed it started to leak. Yup, a leaky gas-tank, not good. So we went there so they could fix whatever made it leak, and we got a loaner.

I called my father in law and he came buy and helped me fix the tap, he has bad knees and bad back so I made it all to his instructions, it worked really well. Thanks Krister!

Then in the mail the stuff I’ve ordered for my CNC build had arrived, so we took the loaner to the first of the two places the post should be at. They had summer hours so they don’t open until 15. They didn’t mention that on the note. So we went to get the second package, witch it seems also was at the first place we went, but they forgot to mention that on the slip. retards. So no CNC stuff yet. I also checked, and they have tried to deliver it to my house (they say) but I was not home (they say) and that is true, for one of the packages. The second package I really was home. I even think I saw the delivery guy, but he did not ring the bell. Not that he had had to, the door was open. But he obviously didnt want to get of his fat ars.

So now I’m using this here blog as therapy to calm down. Not easy to do when your tired and have a fuse that is about 3 mm long. But I’m trying. soon it will be 15 and I’ll try to get my stuff (again)

First of though, I’ll write a little list of what’s wrong with my car:

The gas tank is leaking.
The fan only has off/on but there are 0,1,2,3 and 4 on the dialer.
The red paint is pale.
the passenger door has a bolt that has went through it so it wont stay open when you open it, instead it just flaps.
The front door flap issue has affected the hull so it’s a bit bent.
The same started to happen on the driver-door, so i ripped a piece of the splicer of.
The driver window is hard to pull down since a unfortunate accident Gange had when driving in reverse.
The shotgun passengers window lever comes of all the time.
The blinkers and some of the other electricity wont work unless you have the key in the exact position, the engine does not care about that though, you can rive anyways.
Last year when I tried to fix the paint with wax it got stuck on the windows, in the corners, that haven’t come of yet.
Under the registration at the front, part of the car body is loose.
The back registry-sign is bent, Tova had a thing for bending it when she was a kid.
It’s always dirty on the inside.
There is no cup holder.
There is no AC.
It has no acceleration left in it.
Varios dings and dents in the body.
The window wipers back work, but the window wiper fluid has stopper working there.
Some thing for the weels are a bit loose, so sometimes the wheel feels more like a pneumatic hammer.
A light in the back is out.
It drinks oil like crazy.
That’s from the top of my head only, I’m sure I forgot to write loads more.

And I still haven’t packed for the festival I’m going to tomorrow.

now It’s over 15:00 so I’m gonna go and se if I can get my stuff.

thanks for listening.