Saturday, January 12, 2008

 

Arduino Firmware v1.1 Released

Yay! I finally got non-sick, non-busy, and non-not-in-New-York and got a few hours to sit down mano-a-arduino and finished the RepRap protocol integration. The hardest part and biggest challenge was implementing the Celsius -> PIC temperature reading (as well as PIC temperature reading -> Celsius). Thanks to Steve DeGroof, I was able to plug some values in for an 'ideal' thermistor and everything worked like a charm. The PIC emulation is accurate within a couple degrees at the high end (250C) and within a few tenths on the low end (room temp).

What this all means is that the Arduino based electronics are now 100% compatible with the current host software.

For all those who are using the Arduino based electronics, its *highly* recommended that you upgrade (otherwise, they wont really work.) Here's what you gotta do.

1. download the new firmware from SourceForge.
2. copy the library files from the firmware .zip into your arduino's library directory. overwrite the old libaries if you have an older version of the RepRap Arduino firmware.
3. update the firmware and host software prefs as per the wiki.

Thats it! If you have any questions, bugs, or suggestions, let them fly in the comments.

Comments:
Good news, Zach & Steve. I'm looking forward to trying out the Arduino when I get back from LinuxConf.

Vik :v)
 
Great to hear Zach.

Exactly how did you confirm it is 100% compatible? You tossing this term around or is there a software/printing testing series or something?

I say this... as sometimes I know there are people out here who get confused on the state of "it is 100% ready, proven" vs "experimental beta firmware release and I'm the only person who has tried this".
 
Hey Zach - I've got a diff for you for driving the steppers with a SLA7026M. It redefines the "direction" and "step" pins to directly control the polarity of the coils. Also adds a "state" variable to the RepStepper class, to facilitate the correct stepping of the motors - which is a grey code, interestingly enough. Might be useful for a lot of people who have a different electronics settup. I've tested it as part of my G-Code firmware for the arduino, and it works fine.

I can't get your firmware (modified by my diff) to talk to the host software though. I'm getting errors like "Receive error, re-sending: Timeout receiving byte" and "Resend limit exceeded. Failing without reported error." It may be a hardware problem, as I had to disable hardware flow control in minicom to get it to actually send characters to the arduino. I'm not sure, but I don't think that's normal
 
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