HOW TO MAKE ALMOST ANYTHING - MACHINE WEEK
First step was to simply get the servo and stepper motors to work with the driver board! Then homing and gantry testing was conducted with the system. Then we decided to play a little with the movement, making the cursor path shaky to add to the scary aura. We then tested the candle falling platforms.
To code our gantry system we used the Step Dance Library. Initially, there were two ways of deciding cursor movement, one being inputting the absolute location on the board, and another using a “home” letter like A to determine (and hopefully parametrize) the distances. The most optimal would have been the second choice and we began by making equations for the (x, y) positions, but with the way letters were aligned on the board to circle the center image, we ended up switching to just finding absolute positions.
To find distances, we used Adobe Illustrator to size the engraving image file up to scale and essentially digitally measure the distance from the center of the cursor eyelet. First, we broke up letters in color categories by Y-height, drawing mock cursor eyelets perfectly over the letter. Then we found where the letter A was stationed using the “Measure” tool, and measured all the Y- values for each category before going in and calculating the individual X offsets. Then finally, we just solved the (x,y) positions to find the absolute positions once we realized it actually wasn’t that helpful!
