Week 13: Machine Design

Making Machines that Make

Dec 14, 2016

This week we did a group project to make different parts of a machine, assemble it, and give it a function with mods.

We followed instructions on this and divided into groups. My group was in charge of controlling the machine and making a GUI for it with mods. First thing we did was to setup the enivironment to control the machine and send coordinates to the machine to go to. Instructions are on the pygestalt github page. To set coordinate, we added (x,y) to the 'moves' variable ( a list of coordinates) in fabnet_xyaxes.py

Then on the mods side, we wanted to create a toolpath from an image and send it to the machine.

We copied the image processing modules used in the PCB milling mods. Created a toolpath from the processed image. Converted toolpath from object(Object) to string(JSON) using the object string module. Added a format string module to read the toolpath. Lastly, a prtiner module to send the toolpath to the machine.

But the problem was that the object string module's included all variale names and their values as arrays, whereas we only wanted the toolpath array. None of us were familiar with javascript, so we couldn't figure out how to only output the array without it's name. We played around with this code.

Looking at the instructions page again, it seems like we could have eliminated a few blocks. First of all, we didn't need to creat a JSON file at all. We could use the path(array) output of the vectorize module, convert that to strings and then send it to a printer.