OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE - from fibers to fabrics

For this weekWe were working on building a felting machine, and since we were 4 we divided our work so that Carlos and Ale worked on the design of the machine, Eldy worked on the header of the machine and I worked on the control of the motors and a basic interface for the machine. More documentation of the project can be found on Alexandra's page.

Files

All the files created for this assignment can be downloaded by clicking on the link bellow:

Working With Gestal Nodes

On the week 9 of the 2017 FabAcademy course I worked with gestal nodes for controlling the movements of an scaner, this are electronic boards which permit the control of stepper motors by commands sent by serial communication from a PC.

The machine we were wanting to made should have move in the X, Y and Z axis; so, I realized that the movement we wanted on the felting machine was pretty similar to the xy_plotter example provided on the pygestalt library, only Z movement was missing on that example. And thus, I decided to work with gestal nodes and work based on the example provided.

I previously made the RS-485 to Fabnet hardware interface needed for connecting a USB-RS485 cable to a Gestalt node for communicating the PC with the gestal nodes through that cable. And also I previously soldered that board; so I did not had to do much. Since the Scanner I did worked with 2 gestal nodes, I just had to add another gestalt node and a motor. The connection for the hardware was as indicated on the image bellow.

Getting The Necessary Software

For controlling the Gestal Nodes, thre is a library called pygestalt, which is a library written in python and can be downloaded from here. So, the first thing I did was to install on my PC a python distribution c