Links - 2010 Oct 7

MicroMagic videos

Three A-heat races from Saturday.
There were a lot of cameras around, so I hope some more (better quality!) material appears on youtube soon (please add a link below in the comments!).

The quality of these clips improve slightly by selecting the "480p" mode on youtube.

A lot of shouting at the start of this one, audio swapped to something more pleasant to protect the innocent and the guilty...

I wonder if the newer camera-phones have better video than the N95? But deciding on a new phone means choosing between android vs. symbian vs. meego - which isn't easy...

Balatonkenese, Hungary

In Hungary it is very important to have a fence around your house. The fence should have barb-wire or sharp pointy things at the top, and a sign saying "Tilos". Up to three exclamation marks after "Tilos" can be used for extra effect. An angry barking dog is optional.

I managed one A-heat, two-three B-heats, and a lot of fooling around and getting crashed into in the C-heat. Probably need to get the Mk1 fin and rudder as they seem to be popular. Lighter batteries also maybe, to have the total weight of the boat close to the minimum (860g?).

A bit of running too during the weekend:
2010oct01_10k_balatonkenese

2010oct03_10k_balatonkenese

Magic Rigs

Building new B and C rigs should be an almost foolproof way of making sure there will be nothing but A-rig during the event on the weekend. We will see.

EMC and EMC2 references

Someone created a wikipedia page for EMC over here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Machine_Controller

The wikipedia-police have immediately put it on the list of pages to be deleted ("unremarkable", "no third party references", "borderline advert", etc.). So I decided to collect some references. It is best to archive them here also, in case the wikipedia page does get deleted.

There should be a report by Rogier Blom called roughly "Design and development of a real time trajectory planner for the Enhanced Machine Controller", but I wasn't able to find that. It's probably the same document as this one (the pdf has chapter 4->): http://emc.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/emc/emc/doc/segmentqueue.pdf?view=log

Please comment below and/or enhance the wikipedia article if you find more references!

  • Proctor, F. M., and Michaloski, J., "Enhanced Machine Controller Architecture Overview," NIST Internal Report 5331, December 1993. Available online at ftp://129.6.13.104/pub/NISTIR_5331.pdf
  • Albus, J.S., Lumia, R., “The Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC): An Open Architecture Controller for Machine Tools,” Journal of Manufacturing Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 278-280, September 1994.
  • Fred Proctor, John Michaloski, Will Shackleford, and Sandor Szabo, "Validation of Standard Interfaces for Machine Control", Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing: Trends in Research, Development, and Applications, Volume 2, TSI Press, Albuquerque, NM, 1996, http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/documents/proctor/isram96/isram96.html
  • Leto et al., "CAD/CAM INTEGRATION FOR NURBS PATH INTERPOLATION ON PC BASED REAL-TIME NUMERICAL CONTROL", 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCED MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY JUNE 12-13, 2008 UNIVERSITY OF UDINE - ITALY, http://158.110.28.100/amst08/papers/art837759.pdf
  • Glavonjic et al., "Desktop 3-axis parallel kinematic milling machine", The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology Volume 46, Numbers 1-4, 51-60 (2009), http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00170-009-2070-3
  • Milutinovic et al., "Reconfigurable robotic machining system controlled and programmed in a machine tool manner", The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00170-010-2888-8

OpenCAMLib from HeeksCNC

I've tried using opencamlib through heekscnc. With a few minor modifications to the ocl_funcs.py script I got it working. Although ocl prints some debug information and a progress bar to the console when run standalone, I couldn't find that window in heekscnc. Even with this small example there are obvious issues with memory management (sometimes 8 Gb wasn't enough!) on either the heekscnc or ocl-side of things (or both!).

On Ubuntu 10.04LTS getting all the bits and pieces, compiling them and installing them was a breeze thanks to this install script. However the GUI feels very "sticky" with the mouse cursor not really going where I want it to go, and the keyboard focus being in surprising places when I want to edit properties. It must be possible to make a GUI that feels good to use with wxgtk, right?

I think currently the inputs and outputs of these two operations, "ZigZag" and "Waterline", are defined in at least three places: ocl itself, the python script ocl_funcs.py, and in the heekscnc c++ GUI code that displays the menus and buttons. Something like introspection or reflection or naked objects would be needed so that a GUI can query the libraries that are present on what operations they offer, what input they need, and what output they produce. If I get my head around some generic-enough GUI ideas I might try writing something myself also. Most probably based on Qt and VTK. In any case the cutting-simulation needs to be driven from a C++ GUI, for performance, I think.

Sunday twentytwo

A nice way to get some variation into the long runs is to take the bus/metro somewhere far and run back home. Google says it's only about 13 km by car to Vuosaari, but if you follow the coast closely it's much longer.

km 2-4: Lots and lots of new houses in Aurinkolahti (Helsinki's own Santa Cruz) before a dive into a green area at km 5-6 (roughly resembling Helsinki central park). Over the vuosaari bridge at 7-8, and into Marjaniemi, an older housing-area around km 8-10. At km 12 you can look at the rich people who are envious of the even richer people, because they have a nicer RIB at the pier just down from their (multi?)million-euro villa. More lots and lots of new houses at "Eastend", a newly built area at km 14-15. The houses are built to look like (large) cottages in the archipelago with a grey weather-beaten-wood look to the outside. However closer inspection reveals it's not wood, just a paneled grey-painted wall. I wonder if admiral Cronstedt would approve? The Iraqi embassy at the 90-degree bend between km 16 and 17 looks as if nothing ever happened, with a well groomed lawn and flowers at the front. Gloves on for the windy kulosaari-bridge at km 18 which offers a nice view into the city center - you can easily count 5-6 churches another half dozen landmarks from here. The view would be even nicer without the architectural concrete-wonders of merihaka at km 20. Just after km 21 the restaurant on tervasaarihas put up a cheesy advert featuring santa-claus and santas-little-helpers. Since the pace was a slow 6:30/km-ish, I decided to quit at 2 hours 20 minutes, or 22 km.

Links - 2010 Sep 23

PCB Milling

We have a 1994 LPKF Protomat S91 PCB mill in the lab for making prototype PCBs. Here it was used to cut a circular part (not a PCB) which was first drawn in CorelDraw, then saved in HPGL format, and then opened in BoardMaster which is the program that controls the mill through a quirky serial protocol. I think the original LPKF design has a solenoid for the up/down z-movement of the tool. The solenoid would become unreliable during a long run, because it was getting very hot, so on our mill it has been replaced with a more reliable pneumatic cylinder. The spindle is a Proxxon hand-tool, and tool changes are manual.