Browsing Posts in Projects

I’m continuing to work on the 3rd installment of the EMC2 and Servo tutorial, but I realized that I hadn’t seen any great treatments out there for simple e-stop implementations with EMC2 or otherwise in the hobby CNC realms. This is the solution I’ll be using as part of the tutorial apparatus. Safety systems aren’t […]

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="320" caption="Printer Carcass Ready For Use"]Stripped Inkjet Printer[/caption]

So you’d like to play with servo motor control would you? Well hopefully you’ve come to the right place and we’ll actually be able to learn you a thing or two. In this next segment we’re going to learn about some of the internals of an old inkjet printer and how to recycle it to serve our purposes. This is obviously part 2 of the series, where you’ll strip down the printer and prepare it for integration with EMC2.

Galvin over at On Shoulders has started his new season with OpenSCAD for 3D printing.  While historically I’m a SolidWorks user myself, I look forward to this offering and trying it for myself.

So again I wanted to work on putting together the next piece in the EMC2 Servo lab series tonight only to thwart myself.  I shot a bunch of pictures last night with my newly rehabilitated camera. When I sat down today my iPhoto library was kinda corrupted so I decided to rebuild it.  Well right […]

Based on the venerable L298 Dual H-Bridge , Solarbotics has put together a really nice little kit for low-mid voltage level motor control applications. You trade a little sweat equity for the few bucks you save over other offerings by fully assembling the kit yourself. One of the nice bits about this kit is that […]

Well I’d planned on spending the evening snapping pics and scratching out the next part in the inkjet and servo lab series, but when I pulled my trusty Olympus SP-350 out of the backpack, I discovered it made some odd grinding noises, extended and retracted the lens a couple times eventually displaying “Zoom Error” on the screen. ARGH!!!

EMC2 is a popular choice among hobbyists, academics and a growing group of professionals for CNC and robotic machine control. Most commonly it seems to be used to drive machines using stepper motors for reasons related to low cost and complexity. In actuality EMC2 drives servo mechanisms equally well, but in doing my research in preparation for my own projects I found that there was a need for a simple tutorial laying out basic procedures for integrating servo control under EMC2. As always, the very best way to learn is to do so I ended up playing with a small servo “lab” so I could visit as many concepts and parameters as I could before applying them to a larger machine.

Another concept for 3D printing on a re-purposed inkjet printer. [youtube id=”2nbtZOolSIY” w=”240″ h=”190″]   More Links: Servo and PID tutorials from Galil Motion Control Inc. Servo Tuning Tutorial (PDF)  from PMC Corp.

One of the things I need to do while working towards motion control projects is to practice some of the fundamentals.  I’ve worked with many of the concepts and mechanisms professionally, but more from the support end.  I haven’t touched the stuff for a few years now, and want to learn things at a more […]

Some links that have turned up while doing research: Musings on the usefulness of inkjet printers for a variety of applications.  So ok, I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about this, but here I hope to actually do something about it! Anders is playing with EMC2 and RepRap functionality as well.  I’ve experimented […]