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Do the decimals light?
Great; I’m very glad to hear that, and thank you for following up. :)
Since you tried to run a firmware update while you were having trouble connecting, the first thing that we need to do is figure out what the status of the firmware is.
What I’d like you to try next is manually entering bootloader mode on the EBB:
(1) Disconnect power to the AxiDraw. (Leave it disconnected until communication is re-established. The USB cable can power everything except the motors.)
(2) Disconnect the USB cable. It may be easier to do this at your computer or at the AxiDraw — either way is fine.
(3) Press the pause button on the left side of the machine.
(4) While keeping that button pressed, connect the USB cable.
(5) Release the pause button.If this works, then the EBB should go into a red-green rhythmic-blinking “heartbeat”. If so, that’s a good sign. While it’s still in that “heartbeat” mode, try to run the firmware updater program.
When the updater program runs, it will try a few different things. It could run into one of several different errors and may report them to you. If it either prints “Firmware updated successfully” or a firmware version string like “EBBv13_and_above EB Firmware Version 2.6.4”, then it likely succeeded, even if there are other error messages.
If it does not succeed — if it does not appear to be able to locate the device whatsoever — then the most likely culprits are the USB cable, the USB port, or the computer needs to be restarted. If you’ve restarted and still see a failure to detect the device, then try a different USB cable if you have one available.
If the firmware update does succeed (or likely succeeded), your next step should then be to try again in Inkscape, and see if it can connect.
Sorry– I somehow didn’t get the notification of your post and just saw this now.
Are you still getting an error?
I’m sorry to hear about the accident; that sounds awful.
Here are some general things that you might want to check:
* Make sure that the vertical pen slide still moves freely, and doesn’t feel overly loose.
* Check that the XY carriages feel solid, and don’t rock like there is slop when you try to move them.
* With power off, slowly slide the carriage in X, then Y, then -X, then -Y, in a full rectangle over the full area of travel. Doing so, make sure that it feels like a smooth rectangle without a big bump anywhere.
* Check the USB and power connector, and make sure that they aren’t loose on the control board.If all of that looks good, you’re likely in great shape to keep on plotting. If you find anything suspicious, let us know, and we’ll help you get it fixed.
If any repair parts should be needed, they are indeed available.
What are you doing when inserting a pen that requires you to lower it?
(We have occasionally seen people insert a pen in the “pen down” position, and then manually change the pen-down setting, but that’s the opposite of the recommended procedure.)
The EBB firmware is open source, and hosted in the EggBot repository: https://github.com/evil-mad/EggBot/tree/master/EBB_firmware
The other I/O pins above the servo connector are not polled by default, but you can poll them through software, for example by modding an extension. We would always recommend to use the existing interface rather than modifying the firmware, especially for things like this that are easily done through software: http://evil-mad.github.io/EggBot/ebb.html
Once the pen is in the pen-up position (which you can set from your computer before starting the session), there should not be any need to manually lower or raise the pen again while setting up different pens and papers, even during a full day of use. So, I’m not sure exactly what it is that you’re doing.
It is possible to hard code something like this into custom firmware if that’s your preferred way of coding. But, it is also something that could be done with a custom Inkscape extension, a modification to one of ours, or an independent script on the computer — without any changes to the firmware.
You could potentially modify the firmware to to this.
But, can I ask what the purpose of this change would be? What is it that you’re doing that requires you to toggle the pen up and down repeatedly?
Can you provide some context for what type of writing, what type of display, and so forth? I gather this is AxiDraw related in some way.
My initial guess is that this could have been a “mis calibrated” servo, with the arm at the wrong angle, but since it’s one of ours, I would now suspect that it is just a bad servo. If so, please contact customer service via email for a replacement.
One other thing to check, if you are able to, would be to try raising and lowering the pen between those same values from within Inkscape (ideally on a desktop computer). If it still fails in the same way, you can be sure that it’s a matter of hardware failure rather than of something in the software setup or parameters in the CLI.
Is this one of our servos that came with the arm pre-attached, or is this some other servo?
Please contact technical support directly; we’ll get you up and running, but there are some detailed questions that we’d like to ask.
That’s a generic “unknown executable” flag.
It’s not so much a false positive as a badly labeled correct identification of a file that isn’t recognized by Windows. (An unknown executable could contain any kind of malware. Windows is correct that you shouldn’t go around randomly running executables if you don’t have a good reason to.)
What is this about?
The layer feature is set up to work such that if you created a document in Inkscape that had layers, it would work. If you’re hand-coding SVG, you’ll need to emulate that structure. Some of our AxiDraw example files include layers. You can open up those files in a text editor and look at how they are structured.
An Inkscape layer is a
gelement with attributeinkscape:groupmode="layer". The layer name is specified by an attribute likeinkscape:label="1-Yellow".
