Makelangelo News

Makelangelo dev blog 2020 #2

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!

Tutorials

The Best way to program an Arduino Microcontroller from the Linux Command Line Interface

Updating arduino code over the internet hasn’t been easy for me before now. In this post I will show you how to update 200+ different microcontrollers from the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) using PlatformIO. My specific example (see instagram video below) will be a Teensy 3.2 using a Raspberry Pi, but you can repeat it for many other combinations with a little effort.  This method is specifically for the times when you have no Graphical User Interface (GUI) What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) into the remote machine such as TeamViewer and all you have a bare bones text interface to the remote device.

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News

Jigsolve: Twitch streaming test #1

The Jigsolve now talks on IRC through chat.twitch.tv.  Hooray!

I’m struggling to get the raspberry pi camera to stream to Twitch.  Once that’s done hardware integration will be complete.  Everything from there will be marketing and software tweaking (like flood protection).