Thursday, April 28, 2016

Software Integration

Since the hardware is deterministically approaching a usable state, its time to begin the Software integration...

To that end I have setup 5 ROS machines to begin creating and testing the first phases of getting a CubeSpawn machine into a virtualized State

 The 5 Physical machines have remote desktop sessions to cut/paste commands from the tutorials

The integration will focus on getting ROS and Rviz setup, then building a URDF for one of the Cartesian machines.

The integration consists of ROS, Machinekit, MTConnect, and possibly STEP-NC

I'll be focusing on getting some State machine info out of ROS and Machinekit via a very simplified MTConnect configuration, Since SwRI has built a MTConnect instance for ROS Industrial, there is a fairly solid foundation for that half of the channel...

More info here
http://rosindustrial.org/news/2013/11/9/ros-industrial-mtconnect-integration-program-completes

On the Machinekit side, it appears this has been discussed, but not implemented, however, I'll be dissecting the MTConnect/Makerbot repo
https://github.com/mtconnect/makerbot_agent

For while I have no love for Makerbot, a MTConnect to serial Cartesian device code base of some sort should provide a basis for retrieving state info, which should make hacking together a Beaglebone/Machinekit 3D printer example within the scope of this preliminary effort.


Thanks to John Morris, (A Machinekit Developer) I have this nifty System Diagram:



The "CubeSpawn Coordinator" is probably beyond my skills at this point, but if I can hack some basic communication FROM the machines with the available pieces, then writing a simple polling loop to push info to them should at least make some rudimentary control possible - then we'll bring in a professional.. ;-)

An' inch at a time...



Saturday, April 16, 2016

The End of Prototyping is The Beginning!

Closing in on the end of trying out ideas and starting the control software integration efforts











The Electrical Module houses the control electronics for a range of Cartesian machines.

Although much module evolution is expected, this gets the idea out of our minds and into yours ;-)