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Please leave the servo motor disconnected for the moment. If you leave the motors on for a while, do they get hot to the touch? As in, not slightly warm, but hot?
Second: Please try the “preflight” test from the user guide– with USB and power disconnected, turn the motor winches through the full range of the machine, to test to see if the motion is smooth and consistent. If it is not, then there may be a problem that is independent of the motors and control system.The servo is clearly malfunctioning, as are the stepper motors. However, it’s not clear which (if either) are cause or effect here. If you turned up the motor current too much, it’s possible that it’s pulling down the power supply at peak usage, which could cause the servo to glitch. On the other hand, if the servo has failed, it could also pull down the power supply, causing the steppers to malfunction.
Please try the following:Check to see if the servo motor is getting hot.Try unplugging the servo motor (at the EBB control board), to see if that has any effect on the steppers– do they work again once the servo is unplugged?And, did you adjust the motor current?In any case, it’s certainly not beyond repair, but it may plausibly need repair. You’re certainly welcome to send it back to us for a tune up, but we’d prefer to get things working in place for you, if possible.Thanks! These look like great improvements, and I’ve added them to the repository already. I’m a fan of Source Sans Pro, so it’s especially nice to have that one on the list. :)
In terms of communication and logic protocols, I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t work. However, there is a concern with the logic voltage levels. The Alpha Clock Five uses 5 V logic, and the RPi uses 3.3 V logic. Signals coming from the RPi to the A5 should work fine (the A5 can understand 3.3 V logic inputs), but signals from the A5 to the RPi will be at 5 V, and could damage the RPi input pin if it that pin is connected. It is possible to add a logic level converter (in a few different ways) if you need to get data back. Or perhaps, since it’s primarily a display device, you won’t mind not getting data back.
If you have the blue or white model of the A5, it comes with a 9 V power supply, and a (small) voltage regulator to step that down to 5 V to drive the on-board logic. (The red model comes with a 5 V power supply.) The 9 V power supply does have excess capacity, so you can use an additional voltage regulator to drop that down to 5 V to power the RPi. I would not recommend using the on-board regulator to power the RPi; it does not have much excess capacity.Yup, that sounds awful! My guess is that something in the XY motion control system was genuinely broken in shipping. It looks like you’ve followed up with us directly by e-mail, so we’ll follow up with you there.
I have never seen a case where servo chatter influenced the lines being drawn– the servo horn should not be in contact with the vertical slide when the pen is down. If the horn is touching the vertical slide while the pen is down, then you should select a lower position for the pen-down position.
That said, 25% speed at the low resolution setting is relatively fast, and you should expect to see some wiggling of the lines, regardless of the pen height. We normally only use this kind of speed or faster with broad felt-tip pens. There is always a tradeoff between speed and precision– you may prefer to go slower for higher quality. Another thing to consider, if only long strokes are causing problems, is to use the “constant speed” option, which turns off the acceleration. That will slow down the speed on long paths, and move faster on short paths, in comparison with the default behavior.I’ve made a few more changes for clarity and better centering, and merged it into the main branch. *Thank you* for all your hard work on this! I suppose that making a font editor is another good topic for the future. :)
Thanks! One more round of minor updates pushed, just now.
Also, while pondering that new Hershey Text extension, I’m thinking about moving Hershey Text development out of the EggBot repository (https://github.com/evil-mad/EggBot) and into the “plotink” repository (https://github.com/evil-mad/plotink/), which is our generalized set of plotter helper routines.I’ve made some first-round revisions to that branch– chiefly adding some detailed credits for each of the fonts, re-arranging the list slightly, tweaking the display of the font table, and revising the text and formatting of the extension. Please take a look!
This may be different enough that it belongs in a separate extension, but I’m thinking about replacing a block of text with stroke-based text. This becomes much more appealing with the additional fonts that you have added.
I’ve started a new branch at GitHub to track this, with your current version as the starting point: https://github.com/evil-mad/EggBot/tree/HersheyText-expanded
The differences between your .inx file and the one from GitHub are actually those added by the Inkscape developers when they added it to the codebase.Ah; about those name collisions– I meant that the new names (“bird,” “capitol,” “delight”) were likely to have collisions, rather than the prefixes. Anyway, let’s run with it. I have some new ideas for other enhancements to Hershey Text as well. :)
Here is a more comprehensive list: https://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/vendorlist.aspx
H.T.E. looks OK, although I cannot type it — it is literally the only thing in my autocorrect dictionary!
More suggestions: EMS (for Evil Mad Scientist)NH: For New HersheyHSS: For Hershey Single Stroke (Also sounds like High Speed Steel, which is good for those of us that use the Hershey Text fonts for engraving things!)I don’t have any other particular suggestions about names, but I expect that some of those do collide with other known font names.I see– this was a google result. Roger that. SS is taken, as is HTS.
HT1?
