I headed over to Techgarage today with my limited time and worked on assembling the first linear actuator for Slidemap v10.1 because the parts came in. I built it quickly which was good and I realized that my design has very easy access to all screws and holes which will be extremely useful when I have changes to make. The movement was also extremely smooth. There was just one problem with the design. The nut that slides inside the gorail is completely flush with gorail. Meaning when I screw my mount onto it rubs slightly against the gorail. It didn’t have a big impact on this slider most likely because the gorail was fairly smooth but, I am anticipating having problems down the line with the nut not being able to move. I may need to buy 1mm spacers and attach it to the inside c using a 7mm spacer to make up the gap. The channels would still touch but that is less of a problem and will probably actually increase the stability.
The Ramps Controller that I talked about in my last Slidemap post finally came in. We bought an all in one controller that has the stepper drivers the Ramps control board and the Arduino all rolled into one, it is called the Makerbase. It’s a great idea and when I saw it I had to get it. The controller takes G-code in the same way the normal Arduino Ramps controller would. I took this chance to test if I could get it working. I had to flash the board with the marlin firmware and then download pronterface to send g-code commands manually with a UI. I also had to find a stepper motor with the right connector to plug into the Ramps board which took me about an hour. Then I spent another hour troubleshooting code as to why the stepper wasn’t moving only to realize that I had completely forgotten a power supply. The board needs 12V in addition to the 5V provided by the UBS port. After getting a power supply the controller worked perfectly with the marlin firmware the movement of the stepper was smooth and I could move at any speed I wanted too.
When I got home from techgarage I wanted to see if I could write a quick python script to send G-Code commands over serial to the board. Sure enough, sending G0 X50 made the linear actuator move to 50mm. This solution to communicate with the steppers shows great potential and the next step would be to create a control API that allows me to call functions like moveX from python and have SlideMap move. The XYZ table I designed could also be adapted into a 3d printer.
I put the code I have written so far in a git repository I will be using for all of my Slidemap control code here.
Devin Willis 