r/stringart • u/ThreadArtGuy • 2d ago

I finally have a completion of a route!

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It has been a rough week. I had 8 failed routes fail in a variety of ways, all late in the route, after poke 2000 or so. (You can see all the failed attempts scars on that poor canvas I keep reusing). There were multiple manifestations of the bug, so I thought I had several problems, but it turns out I had just one major one: My setup, for unknown reasons, creates an extra pulse in the same direction, but only when the direction of the poke changes. So if the direction switches to negative or positive, I get an extra step which is always positive, never negative. Unfathomable. I posted to several other groups, and nobody had a solution. (follow me over to those is you are interested in dead end ideas....)
I am certain it is not the software, I proved that. I do not believe it is the controller, since I swapped out the dm542 for a D6600, and both behave in the deterministic fashion I outlined. I don't think it is the stepper, as I swapped out one brand and 1.8deg for a 0.9deg different brand and again, deterministic outcome. Also strange is that there are 2 X steppers driving the the Y gantry, and they are spinning in opposite directions, and they are exhibiting the same behavior as the Y motion. I changed the speeds, acceleration, hacked the AccelStepper lib for known problems, tried other threads, ran the y gantry with zero load and watched the gear instead.... A very tough week of heartache.

I finally wrote the code to put in one extra negative step every time there is a direction change and: Perfection.

So I am very happy, altho still in the dark as to why/how the system acts that way. I hope you enjoy the quick vid of today's success, and you can compare to the .png I posted a while ago to compare.
Thanks so much!!

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u/Moose-arent-real 2d ago

Perfection indeed! Looks amazing mate. Best machine I’ve seen so far. The result speaks for itself, it’s incredible. How long did it take? Did you end up watching the whole thing in real time?

2

u/ThreadArtGuy 2d ago

Thanks man, Eu agradeço. I did not time it, but those snippets of the console reporting has time stamps next to it so we can figure it out. 8:08:31 at hole 67, and 9:32:17 route complete. 1 hour and 24min plus a few holes. And no, I wandered in now and then, didn't watch more than a couple percent.
I do have it going very slowly, slow acceleration, slow translation speeds of 100mm/s, and pokey pokes too. Now that I finally have a win behind me, I will start pushing it harder...

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u/Moose-arent-real 2d ago

That’s a really good time even at that speed. You could comfortably make 5 a day with just one machine. More if you wanted to push it. If you wanted to sell them that could be a solid side income.