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It’s a work in progress, and is undergoing regular revisions. It’s available in private beta to AxiDraw users; please contact us with your serial number to request the latest build.
That’s no good! Please contact tech support, and we can send you a replacement power supply.
That very much sounds like a soldering issue, but it could also be an issue of a loose component — for example a chip not fully seated in a socket. To start debugging, it would be helpful to try to reason from what the exact behavior is. For example if the display is going off but it’s still keeping time, then it’s probably something in the display drivers, rather than something to do with the power. If it’s fully losing power, then start looking at the power jack, and see if (for example) you can find a point that you can wiggle to cause it to lose power. If you can identify where the problem is coming from, then perhaps there’s something not fully seated, or something that needs to be resoldered.
Also visually check for loose or missing solder joints of course– these are by far the most likely cause of issues like these.
The first question is whether the power supply is still working. Try measuring it directly, to see what it’s actually outputting.
As to the solution, that depends a great deal on what is wrong. If the power supply is damaged, you’ll need to replace it. The microcontrollers are quite tough, and rarely get damaged, even by brief overvoltage or reverse voltage. They can, rarely, get into a situation where they need to be reflashed, and yes, our source code is available online.
We do sell power supplies that work well to power multiple boards; our 5 V 1 A board powers up to 5 Octolively modules and our 5 V 3 A board powers up to 15 Octolively modules.
Great– glad to hear that it was something simple. :)
Do the other two motors respond properly?
If the pen-lift motor is not responding at all, then if (1) the XY motion is working correctly and (2) the cable is plugged in, it is likely that the motor itself has physically failed. We’ll follow up through your other message about getting you a replacement.
If these are traditional RGB 5050 LEDs — with two pins for each LED element and no built-in controller chip — then there isn’t any one particular quick and easy way to do it. Rather, you’re now in the territory of microcontrollers, and individually controlling multiple LEDs. You might consider starting with a Lilypad board or an Adafruit Trinket, and look at the various tutorials for programming those boards.
Yes, that is the correct source image.
This was not made by StippleGen, but with a similar program that we have written in Processing, which creates “string art” style drawings like that. We have not yet released the software — we are still tweaking it and it’s pretty rough around the edges — but if you (or any other AxiDraw owner) would like to give it a try at this early stage, we would be happy to put together a beta version that you can try out. Please use our contact form to make the request.
Also, secret StippleGen feature: press the ‘x’ key to increase the allowable stipple count. Just beware that things are slower (and less stable) with higher stipple count.
You are absolutely welcome to post things like that here, including any appropriate links (thank you for asking). I think that the forum does still disallow image uploads, though.
There’s rarely a compelling reason to checking for DST more than once per second, and often not more than once per minute or hour.
Great; glad to hear it!
In our experience, 8 out of 10 times, something like this is caused by a poor solder joint. If you can’t find the problem in the first pass, please let us know and we can make some additional suggestions.
Try to (gently) rock out one or two of the LED modules– if you can swap two of them, that should be able to confirm for you whether it’s the LED module or the board.
Since all of the segments are out, it would certainly suggest that it’s not the LED module or soldering at the joints there, but rather an issue with the “common” signal going to the whole LED block.
Make sure that your chips are fully seated. Check the soldering at the resistor packs, at U5, and at the transistors. Make sure that you don’t have one of those transistors backwards, too. If everything looks good there, double check the soldering at U1 and your LED socket.
The AxiDraw is an A4/Letter size plotter. It is not designed for plotting larger things. We are considering an extended X-rail version — please contact us directly through our contact form if you’re potentially interested in that — but the Y does not scale the same way.
We are also working on larger-scale plotters, but do not yet a release date set.
Please read the answer above about .ps and .eps files. You do not necessarily have to import into Inkscape– there are various ways to drive the AxiDraw including a low-level serial interface. Printing directly from within Illustrator is not supported. If you are starting with graphics in Illustrator, I’d suggest saving as SVG directly from Illustrator, rather than going through EPS, PS, or PDF.
