Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Line buffering in the Arduino
Arduino line buffering from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.
I have implemented a poly-line buffer in the Arduino code. This means that, when the host software wants to plot a polygon, it doesn't have to wait till one line segment is finished before sending the next. It can just blast them at the Arduino as fast as it likes (it gets stopped when the buffer is full...) and, more importantly, the Arduino always has a line ready to plot so there is no dwell between one line and the next.
The video shows it working. As you can see, the movements are much smoother with fewer and shorter pauses (unless your broadband is a bit narrow, when any jerkiness will be download delays...).
There are still some tweaks that need to be made to the host Java software (this upgrade has very temporarily killed temperature polling, for example...). We'll do that over the next few days.
Meanwhile, if you want to experiment, the host software is here, and the Arduino code is here.
For it to work you have to set the properties variable Extruder0_PauseBetweenSegments to false.
Labels: arduino, buffering, firmware
