Week Ten

This weeks assignments

Mandala machine

Python and Nadyas files

I basically took care of the majority of programming, but got alot of helpful input and research from the team.

If you havent updated your computer to linux from windows, like me, you will need a few things in order to be able to use python to run the machine. So, first things first, lets get python. Then press "windows + pause break", into advanced system settings, environmental variables and then "new variable", name it path and under value put the location of your python folder. Bingo, now you can call up python in comand promt.

After that, open up your your git bash. Then head over to Nadyas pygestalt git hub webpage. Clone the link to the webpage and in git bash write "git clone https://github.com/nadya/pygestalt.git mtm" - where the url is the actual webpage name (it happened to be this url when this was written) and mtm is a folder it creates and downloads the files into, it can really be any name.

Under "examples/machines/htmaa" you find some example files to use with your machine. Now you need to plug in your USB FTDI RS485 cable and let windows download the drivers for it. When that is done you can open cmd within the htmaa folder and type "python single_node.py" and you should see the gestalt board blink. if you push the button and the motor moves you can now start to tinker.

Python programming

I started modifying the xy_plotter.py file. I soon found out that if I didint want to hardcode everything i needed to do some smart things. Since i have never worked with python before I thought it would probably be better to look at other peoples work and I soon found this webpage of a foam cutter. The most interesting part for me was how they managed to get a csv file read into the python scrips. So with a few copy paste and modifying it to our machine I could then produce a csv file in excel and read it directly through python with our machine.

With more time, we probably would have been able to get our machine to do something more fancy. But right then and there our machine basically just turns the rotary axis in cyrcle and moves the straight axis back and forth. We figgured out that about 16.36 as a super coord was 90° rotation. So for every 90degrees on the rotary axis, the straight axis moves back and forth one time.