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You’re probably fine with a modest amount of added weight. The springs are pretty aggressive, especially when highly compressed. Weights have the advantage of a consistent load.
We can sell you one if you use our contact form or email our store to request it.
However, it really isn’t recommended for anything except the brushless servo. The main reason is that it increases the power draw of the pen lift servo. It’s potentially enough to exceed the capacity of the regulator that drives it, and/or enough to leave too little drive power left for the XY motion. (It also can reduce the lifetime of brushed servo motors.)
The brushless upgrade includes an upgraded power supply and does not use the voltage regulator on the AxiDraw control board, so it does not have these concerns.
Awesome, very glad to hear it!
Option 1 gives it the “narrow eye” mode, same as holding down the button at turn-on.
Option 2 makes the lights march slowly in one direction only.
The computer should be able to run a reasonably modern version of macOS, Windows, or Linux, but doesn’t otherwise need particularly good specs.
A used mac can work quite well, but does need to be new enough to run Inkscape 1.2.
There are plenty of cheap windows machines out there, including low-end mini-computers. Here are a couple of examples of types that seem to be available now and would likely work fine (once you add a keyboard, mouse, and compatible monitor):
Link1
Link2There are similarly priced Windows laptops as well.
If you’re comfortable using it, a low-end linux computer like a Raspberry Pi can work as well.
It sounds like you’re using AxiDraw Merge. AxiDraw Merge currently only supports controlling a single AxiDraw at a time. (That said, some people have apparently been able to run multiple copies of Inkscape 1.1 in order to control multiple AxiDraw machines from one computer using AxiDraw Merge.)
As far as splitting the CSV file goes, that really isn’t necessary. You can use the same template file and CSV file, and select different page (row) ranges for each.
This approach is *extremely* cumbersome for a number of reasons (Excel to Word, a merge, to PDF, to Inkscape, then Hershey Text). The bugs are something that we could look at, depending on what their exact nature is.
Word doesn’t support stroke fonts, nor is there any good workflow for plotting directly from Word.
The software that you should use for this is our AxiDraw Merge application (as discussed in the AxiDraw user guide). Once you are set up with it, AxiDraw Merge can automatically (1) optionally populate a template with data sourced from a CSV spreadsheet file, (2) render the text into handwriting-like stroke-based fonts using our Hershey Advanced software, (3) optionally add intentional variations so that text does not (for example) lie upon straight lines, and (4) plot the document. It can also merge and plot subsequent pages upon a button press or after a time delay.
From the readouts we can see that your computer is successfully communicating with the AxiDraw and that your power supply is detected and appears to be working.
There could possibly be an issue with the power supply — if it is putting out the right voltage but doesn’t have any substantial current sourcing ability. However, that seems unlikely as a first guess.
When you try to run a plot, do you hear any sounds at all from the AxiDraw? And, do the motors seem to engage and lock the carriage in place? Or, does the carriage still move freely as though it were unplugged?
I have heard of occasional errors reported by Inkscape on things like this, but I have not had any reports of Inkscape actually failing to load extensions because of it.
If your extensions aren’t loading, this probably is not related to the reason why. If you can say anything else about what specific issue you are having within Inkscape (ignoring this report), I can probably help direct you to a solution.
Alternately, contact support for the 3.8 release which does have an overhaul of the .inx files, or wait for its release which should be in the next couple of weeks.
This too is subtle: you have
ad.options.speed_penpendownthere, notad.options.speed_pendown— which does work.After fixing *that*, this seems to be more responsive.
A separate question is why does it assume that the pen is down? And, that may be a bug proper. (The pen state is somewhat undefined until it is asserted, and that’s part of the problem.)
Add this above your move commands to ensure that the pen state is well defined:
ad.options.manual_cmd = "raise_pen" ad.plot_run()At first glance, I agree that something looks wrong there; probably a bug. I’ll look into it and report back.
Looks like your firmware is up to date; that all looks just fine.
Instead of physically unplugging, I do expect that either rebooting the EBB or disengaging the motors first would work just as well. (There’s no CLI command to reboot the EBB, but I can write you a very short python script to do so if that’s helpful.)
Hmm.
Testing with the current release version ( AxiDraw Command Line Interface 3.7.2; AxiDraw Software 3.7.1), I’m not currently able to reproduce the issue with this script. I downgraded to 3.7.0, and I’m still not able to reproduce it.
Check to make sure that you have EBB firmware 2.6.2 or newer; the current version is 2.8.1.
One subtle thing about the walk_home command is that it tries to move the carriage to the position where the motors were enabled (or, last time the resolution was set), by querying the total sum of motor steps since then. This isn’t necessarily the same as where the “software” origin is located; a temporary origin is created each time that you call ad.plot_setup, for example.
If there has been a position-loss event — grinding motor noises etc. — then you may want to try resetting the AxiDraw (unplug power and USB) or disabling then re-enabling the motors to be sure that it’s position is reset. Otherwise, it may not know the correct direction and distance from its current position to that power-on position.
There’s no support for clipping paths in the AxiDraw software at present, though it is a planned feature (work is underway, but has been for a while).
That said, the AxiDraw software does treat the document bounds as a (rectangular only) clipping path. If you can arrange your document bounds such that they appear exactly at your intended clipping bounds, that will work just fine in practice.
You *can* add an LED, but the actual behavior (and safety…) depend on how that string is actually wired internally. If it runs on AC, the “right” way to do it (assuming that there aren’t any “smart” electronics inside) might be to use a variac, or AC dimmer of another sort.
