Fighting with computers

I needed for a project to create a parallel finishing tool path similar what many CAM software does. There is nothing wrong with existing CAM software but what fun would be to just buy and use the software. The basic idea is that you can use a swipe plane across the mesh representing your volume and get the top part of each slice to be the tool path. A similar idea is used for 3D printing, but there the swipe plane is an horizontal one and object is built from the bottom up. The problem is that you cannot use the slice you just obtain from the mesh as milling bit (or extruded filament if 3D printing) has a non-null dimension. Because of that, just following the contour of the object will create a smaller result than the model. For 2.5D milling you can do a waterline finishing, doing flat passes on XY-plane. Thus a simple polygon offsetting operation can help you get the part dimensions right. But for 3D milling, the tool compensation becomes more difficult. The solution I opted...

A few weeks ago I mentioned a new tool I created for (allegedly) making my life easier when delivering marked exams to my students. Then I covered the process that happens after the exam. But one key element it was not mentioned is what it needs to do in advance. For my system I needed a set of labels. My prototype used Code-128 barcode that can handle ASCII code to encode each student email using barcode command-line program for Linux. The only problem with that was the lack of additional information being added to the label, such as the student name. Looking around I found a very handy tool by AVERY company, that helps you creating labels on-line for all their range of labels. What is even better is the tool will allow you to upload an excel file with data columns, like names and addresses to create a custom listing you designed and export it as PDF (they offer to print it for you to and deliver the labels to your office too). After some tweaks and, the most difficult part, di...

This week I received a real bargain I wanted to test as a better candidate to be able to control several DC motors in closed loop. I have already tested the STM Nucleo 401 board and I get one 32 bit, signed, hardware encoder input on timer 2 and three more unsigned, 16-bit hardware encoder inputs on other timers. Unfortunately timer 5 was taken by the mbed library I was using. Nucleo is a solid platform and using the cloud IDE actually is not big deal for me. But now I have got a Maple Mini for $4  and I have to tell you I am totally sold. It is so much faster compared to an ATMega Arduino that I am positive it can do the work for controlling two DC motors closed-loop and most likely it can do four or more. The board can handle up to 16 external interrupts, enough for 8 encoders, and it can produce 12 PWM 16-bit resolution outputs (a far cry from 8 bit PWM from Arduino, though I am not sure that will have any impact on the system performance) plus plenty of memory (128K flash...