[Windell Oskay]

The change on your computer could have been the Java version…?

[Windell Oskay]

Which version of processing are you using?  I wonder if you need to downgrade….

[Windell Oskay]

Hmmm.  That’s very strange, and I’m not sure what the problem could be. 

You might try resizing your initial image to be smaller in number of pixels.  The image window is only 800 x 600, so if you start with an image that size, you should reduce the memory requirements somewhat.

[Windell Oskay]

Hi earvedson,

  There are two likely possibilities.  Either the servo is not configured correctly, or your servo is bad and needs to be replaced. 

  First, double check that the servo is plugged into the EBB correctly.  Next, remove the servo from the pen arm, and see if it still behaves this way, even if you change the pen up and pen down position.  It’s important to check this because if the servo arm is in the wrong place (from the setup stage) it can behave exactly as you have described, running all the way to one end and then get stuck there.

 If the servo is still not working, then it will need to be replaced.  Please use the contact form at our shop to request a replacement:  http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/contact

[Windell Oskay]

Hmmm.    Good suggestion!

[Windell Oskay]

Great– glad to hear it!

[Windell Oskay]

You need to connect pin 20 to V+.

[Windell Oskay]

Also, double check that you have +V at pins 20 and 21.

[Windell Oskay]

What is your power supply voltage?

And, are you sure that there’s a good ground connection between the paddles and the AVR?

If no buttons are pressed, what happens?

[Windell Oskay]

Do you have the 10k pull-up resistor in place?

And, are you sure that your buttons are “normally-open” types?

Check to be sure that the button input pins on the AVR show 5V until hou press the button.

[Windell Oskay]

This may have to do with the “paddle” inputs.  If they are at the edge of the range, IIRC, they can serve backwards.

[Windell Oskay]

Hmmm– this is getting interesting!  

The response that you got (Serial<id=0x7fc480396a50, open=True>(port=’/dev/ttyACM0′, baudrate=9600, bytesize=8, parity=’N’, stopbits=1, timeout=None, xonxoff=False, rtscts=False, dsrdtr=False)) indicates that python *is* able to open the serial connection to the EBB if you’re in the correct directory.  If the serial port permissions were the problem, it would have failed at this step.

The Eggbot Control extension would give you a different error (“No module named serial”) if it were not able to load the serial module, so that’s not the root cause either.   

Can you run one more test here, to help identify the root cause? 
Open up the file eggbot.py, and search for the section that starts with
def testSerialPort(…)

   except serial.SerialException:
                        pass

And replace it with:

   except serial.SerialException as inst:
                        inkex.errormsg(‘Serial Communication Errorn’ + str(inst.args))
                        pass

That should indicate the exact error that’s actually occurring.
(This is python, so please be careful to mind the spaces, or you’ll get new syntax errors.)

[Windell Oskay]

Hi Ugi,

Yep, that’s pretty neat.  We’ve been working on our own “cylinder” adapter for some time, but the thought of making it large enough to work on coffee mugs is not bad at all. :)

[Windell Oskay]

Here are two more things to check:

1.   At the terminal, please list the output of:

   ls -l  /dev/ttyACM*

   — just in case there is some other permissions error on your system.

2.  Check to see if python can connect to the EBB directly:

At the terminal, try the following four commands, and let me know the output of numbers 2 & 3:

1.   python

2.   import serial

3.   serial.Serial(‘/dev/ttyACM0’)         

    (if your EBB shows up at a different ACMx number, please use that instead)

4.   quit()

If step 2 fails, move to the directory where your eggbot extensions are located (usually .config/inkscape/extensions/) and try again.

[Windell Oskay]

Hi Ron,

Our goal is that you can use the Eggbot on any of those systems. :)  And, thank you for your kind words about the kit– that really makes our day.

I’ve tracked down the problem, which turns out to be that there are new permissions required to access the serial port. The solution is to add your user account to the “dialup” group on your computer.  If I understand correctly, the command to do that should, on Lubuntu, be:

useradd -G dialout your_username_here 

Please let me know if this works for you!

[Author]

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