The Amp Hour

An Interview with Bart Dring


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Welcome, Bart Dring!

  • Hobby of motion contollers and CNC
  • Got started at Williams pinball (who also make games like Joust and Space shuttle)
  • A lot of wear in pinball cabinets.
  • Got the itch to move onto a "real engineering" job.
  • Microwave for deep space networks
  • Multi kilowatt units with high power dissipation
  • Waveguide switches
  • Getting heat out of the potting
  • Used on things like news trucks and DSN satellites.
  • Military specs for harsh environment
  • CNC machines were discussed by past guests:
    • John Saunders
    • Nadya Peek
    • Sending steps to machines was easier with a parallel port. Now need something like a USB to parallel.
    • Started doing tutorials on Instructables, wanted to win a contest with a human powered Segway to win Epilog laser.
    • Started to document along the way on Buildlog.net
    • First comprehensive laser cutter kit out there, the 2.x laser sold 400 kits
    • Maker Slide was a system for building machines. The Kickstarter raised $25K
    • Since it was open source, others re-started KS campaigns 5 times around the world
    • Factory for extrusion is like 300m long
    • Wrote a yield optimizer to spit out a better way to cut material in his garage.
    • Laen (OSH Park) also talked about optimizers when he was on the show.
    • Approached Inventables to fulfill Maker Slide orders.
    • Worked out a deal for a royalty, they still pay it on orders.
    • Inventables makes Easel, which is a web based program for working with their routers.
    • Inventables also took on the Shapeko, designed by Edward Ford. That machine is made out of Maker Slide.
    • GRBL is the motion controller behind all of Bart's CNC machines.
    • It started with the creator interested in optimizing the code to put on an Arduino.
    • RAMPS controllers
    • Plug in stepper drivers
    • G-code
    • Bart ported GRBL onto PSoC5
    • Why PSoC5? Bart likes the graphical interface and uses it a lot for prototyping.
    • Motion planner
    • Started looking at ESP32 for Bluetooth/WiFi
    • Robots run off the phones
    • Angus doing Arduino stuff for Espressif helped to move things along.
    • API has public functions for RTOS, so it was harder in a real time control sense.
    • Plan was to use primary core for GRBL, other core for communication.
    • Bart put the project down for a while, but Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm) convinced him to try again.
    • The processor had a lot more RAM than other boards, especially Arduino.
    • Finished September 2018
    • Tindie sales
    • Complete web UI for sender
    • Web page has jogging controls and configuration
    • Hoping to put an Easel-like program on there
    • Nickelbot
    • Square coasters with traction feed (Coasty the Coaster Toaster)
    • Exotic kinematics
    • Polar coaster
    • Converting polar to Cartesian coordinates
    • Drawbot badge
    • Hobby servos
    • "Adorably wiggly lines"
    • Workshop at Supercon
    • Scripting in python
    • Polar Platform String Art Machine
    • Open loop vs closed loop
    • Twang
    • Follow Bart on twitter as @buildlog
    • ...more
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      The Amp HourBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

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