Category: News

Makelangelo News

Makelangelo dev blog 2020 #2

2020-01-17 Dan

Out of office

January 18-30 I will be out of the country for some down time. Jin will still be here working on testing machines and filling orders, but no custom builds of Makelangelo Huge will be happening.

Experimental

In the development branch of Makelangelo software there’s always lots going on.

Get the Makelangelo 7.22.6 experimental here.

Pi camera

Github user Mishafarms has added raspberry pi camera support: If you run the software on a pi with a camera it can detect your camera and then use that as a source for images to convert. Nicely done!

Smooth speed improvements

I’ve put in a TON of work to improve the top speed and reducing stutter. I’m currently drawing at 100mm/s and moving (without drawing) at 400mm/s. So it’s now faster and bigger than an AxiDraw plotter. The motors move so smoothly now that they sound almost musical.

Long file names

Another nice to have is that the menus are more responsive on the LCD panel and the filenames on SD cards are now full-length instead of 8 characters.

European number formats

Thanks to the patient feedback of user Joram Neumark I’ve been working to improve support for european users. German computers (or computers with the German Locale) write numbers with a comma instead of a decimal, and the robot does not understand. It doesn’t know it’s in Germany! So instead I’m make sure all numbers written to files are done in the format the robot expects.

Please post to the forums with your experience!

News Robot Arm

Robot Overlord : New 3D Manipulator Controls

2019-12-06 Dan

After nearly a week of screaming at my monitor, I finally got a new system for rotating and translating Sixi2’s hand.

The old method used…

  • mouse LMB for XY translation
  • SHIFT+mouse LMB for XY rotation
  • ALT+mouse LMB for Z translation AND Z rotation

Which (technically) worked, but was super hard to do well.

technically correct

The new system is much easier

  • Double click the robot you want to move and the translate tool will appear.
  • Hover over each handle and it will change color. Click and drag the active handle to drag the robot’s hand. If the robot cannot move the angry joint will turn white, then red.
  • Hold shift to replace the translate tool with the rotate tool. Hover over each handle (the colored rings) and they will change color. Click and drag on the handles to rotate the robot’s hand.

Also

In the future I may even remove the need for the shift key so that everything can be done with a mouse or a touch pad or maybe even a sip+puff.

I tried several things that didn’t work out, like using OpenGL’s Select Buffer. I also notice the rotation handles don’t stay inside the grey circle when they are in the far corners of the screen and I don’t have an answer for that yet.

If you want to read the code in the open source project, start in org.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.DragBall

Also much love to https://www.scratchapixel.com/. Their 3D graphics tutorials kept coming up when I searched for things I needed in Robot Overlord. If you want to learn 3D graphics it is a clean, simple, effective resource.