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I’m sorry to hear about the trouble. It actually is critical to make sure that no pins or leads whatsoever are touching– we call those “short circuits” and as you can probably imagine, they can cause a lot of trouble. In many cases, just having two leads touching can prevent part or all of the circuit for not working. If you know that any pins are connected, stop immediately and physically remove the batteries from the battery pack before proceeding to fix the issue. Applying power when you have a short circuit can cause the batteries to overheat, and it can damage parts of your circuit– so be sure that you don’t have any accidental connections before applying power again.
Yikes, that sounds awful!
I’m very sorry for the trouble; we’ll check our brackets here to see if it’s a more widespread problem. And, I’m glad that you were able to get them tapped. (We’d happily send you replacements, too.)We’ve used a similar hardcoded python trick to get Inkscape extensions (in general) to run under some recent versions of Mac OS, each release of which seems to temporarily break Inkscape extensions.
We’re located in Sunnyvale, CA, so not very close to DC. ;)On my install attempt, I was unable to boot from the so-called “install CD,” but not able to get a network connection, which is needed to finish it. Tried following several guides for installing, but no joy so far.I’m not able to commit a lot of time to that part (installing gentoo) of the project right now. Do you know if there any compiled/”binary” version of Inkscape available that you could test?If voltage is getting to the LED, it is likely that the resistor is good, and that the chip is sending a signal there. (Either that, or you’ve got a short circuit that is causing the voltage to get there…)
One thing not in your list that can go wrong– and commonly does –is that an LED is installed backwards. If you have an extra LED in your kit, you can try placing it against the pins of the non-lighting LED, to see if the LED in that position is either broken or backwards.As I said, if there weren’t a counterexample… and yes, my comment was written after trying to follow that guide and not ending up with a working system. (It would be convenient if there were a real installer for Gentoo.)
Anyway, I did come across something else interesting: It looks like Gentoo may default to Python 3, when we actually need to be running Python 2 for the extensions to work properly:
https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/215655Can you give that fix a try and see if it makes any difference?
> Well, actually I am trying to use MATLAB’s GUI interface to control the LEDs.
You did already say that, but it is actually as I was guessing, more or less: It’s not that you’re writing a program that runs on the Arduino, you’re using Matlab’s firmware on the Arduino, which is designed to interface with the Matlab GUI that you run. That firmware parses commands (a fairly limited set of commands) from the computer and then executes the corresponding command on the Arduino itself.If you want to add a SetPoint function that you can use within MatLab, extend the Matlab firmware by adding the Peggy 2 library to it, and calling the functions that you want to from within that firmware.Well, after working at it for a couple of hours, I now clearly understand why Ubuntu is so popular. If you didn’t have a counterexample, I’d suspect that Gentoo doesn’t actually work….
The Peggy 2 runs Arduino code, and there are a wealth of examples of how to create functions and other types of program features on the Arduino site:
For the most part, we’d recommend using the Peggy 2 specific functions for I/O (rather than the individual pin commands from within Arduino), but for everything else, you can follow the guides to structuring your program, using arrays and variables, and so forth.I’m not sure which you mean by “31” and “32” — there’s a J1 and a J2, which are the ports for programming and communication, respectively.
Yes, you can use functions to simplify the operation and reduce the code usage. You could even define each of the “tracks” as an array that specifies the location of each dot, and then use loops to say something like:
For each light on track XYZ:Turn on lightrefresh 2 secondsclear lightlight++I suppose that you could do that, but you’d need to use a different chip that has an analog input.
Our kit does light the LEDs in order, and advances “nights” automatically. If you want it to be more “manual,” my first-pass approach would be as follows:– When you turn the power on, only the shamash is lit.– For each button press, one additional candle is lit.– Done?If you are writing a program on the Peggy 2, you can indeed use the standard commands– pinMode and digitalWrite –to take individual pins high or low. We also have a Peggy 2 library for Arduino that provides functions for lighting up individual LED locations. You can find the article about that– along with the rest of the Peggy 2 documentation –on our wiki: http://wiki.evilmadscientist.com/Peggy_2
However, I’m guessing (and please let me know if this is the case) you’re asking about is not actually writing programs on the Peggy 2 in the usual way, but instead sending serial commands that are designed to work with Firmata firmware. If that is what you want to do, you’ll need to upload the Firmata program to the Peggy 2 before you use it, and use the commands supported by Firmata.Yes, you can use any available I/O pins for sending and/or receiving TTL pulses.
It would have been kind of you to contact us for assistance before getting to the point–years later –that you’re calling it a “beast.” Ouch.
To begin with, try downloading the current version of Inkscape (0.48.2), and release 2.2.1 of the Eggbot extensions (zip file): http://code.google.com/p/eggbotcode/downloads/detail?name=Eggbot2.2.1.zipMake sure that you only have one copy of these extensions on your computer, restart inkscape, and try our “hello world” example file.While we used Ubuntu to develop the Eggbot extensions for Inkscape (and then ported to Windows and Mac), I do not have direct experience with Gentoo. However, we have not heard any other reports of trouble with Gentoo, nor of the “logic_error” that you’re describing in this or other contexts.I’m not sure what the root cause could be. That error is not thrown by our extension, or by Inkscape when it runs other extensions. So we know that Inkscape is mostly working, and that the python subsystem that it uses is mostly working. We also know that the error is not being generated within our extension, but somehow by something that our extension is doing that the others are not– which could be the use of pyserial, or scanning for serial ports, or perhaps something about the parameters that the extension takes.If your eggbot enumerates to /dev/ttyACM0 under Gentoo, that’s the same base string as under Ubuntu, and so it should– in principle –be able to find it there. However, I wonder if the “sys.platform” variable returned is different under Gentoo, and this is somehow causing a problem.Could you check what the sys.platform variable actually is on your OS? To do so, run python from the command line, type “import sys” and then “sys.platform” .The OS is detected in the eggbot_scan.py file, one of the the Eggbot extensions. It normally checks for a platform of ‘linux2’ and if your sys.platform is (for example) linux3, you may be able to fix it by changing the line that readselif platform == 'linux2':
to instead read:
elif platform == 'linux2' or platform == 'linux3':
Otherwise, I may need to set up a computer here to figure out what the issue is.
Clear-lens LEDs are more visible for a longer distance, but only with a narrow range of angles. For indoor viewing, in normal-sized rooms, we almost always recommend diffused lenses.
