Guitar Pickup Winder

[rwillett]

This project isn't dead, just taking a little nap whilst

 

1. The sodding V1 bass gets finished

2. I play with an Ardunio R4

[rwillett]

I have finally managed to get some progress on the winder, its basically a number of sideways steps but at least they are not backwards

 

I got an Arduino R4 (with Wifi no less) to see if the increase in speed would help driving the stepper motors at a faster speed.

 

I decided that simply moving to the R4 from the R3 was too easy, so decided to move my dev environment from an old Macbook (2013) to a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) but running a CF card and not an NVE so speeds a bit slow. However it's a proper UNIX box and is dedicated to this. I also decided not to use the Arduino IDE and move to the command line and Emacs. I feel a lot happier with a decent editor and TBH prefer the command line. Its just a quicker way of working with Emacs as you rarely take the hands off the keyboard. Pretty simple as well, I've only taken 30 years to learn it properly.

 

The issue then was that nothing worked on the R4, no LCD display, no keyboard input, no stepper motors. It turns out that the R4 breaks a lot of Arduino libraries.

 

So I started with a blank sketch and simply got the LCD to work. That took a little bit of fiddling about but that worked. The next step was to get the keypad to work. No matter what I did, it looked like random key presses coming down the line. Turns out the R4 has a different set of resistors on their circuits and a simple fix (that took a long time to find) was all that was needed and then I had keypad AND a display.

 

Motors were a pain and nothing worked. It turns out that the AccelStepper library which is pretty much a standard doesn't work at all.It also appears that not many people are using an R4 with stepper motors, but a couple of people responded to my plea for help and a pointers to a working library and I ended up with MobaTools, a library aimed at model railways Their sample sketch also included a wifi server to control the R4 from a website, after a few attempts to get the stepper motor pins right on the  CNC Shield and in the code, I got motors to turn, not only did they turn, they turned fast. I managed to go from 6 revs / sec to approx 20 revs / second. Thats 1200RPM. There is no load and nothing else happening so unlikely to keep that speed but thats 3x the max I got from the R3, so I'm a very happy bunny.

 

I need to merge all of the different bits of code together and see if it still works, thats the forward step

 

Rob

Edited June 8 by rwillett

[SamIAm]

[rwillett]

This is my R&D budget agreed with the business.

 

I will admit that I own and run the business, so I approved the R&D request. I did ask some pretty difficult questions of myself to justify the time and money though. It wasn't an easy decision and I had to weigh the pro's and con's up. Business is tough these days.

[SamIAm]

3 minutes ago, rwillett said:

This is my R&D budget agreed with the business.

 

I will admit that I own and run the business, so I approved the R&D request. I did ask some pretty difficult questions of myself to justify the time and money though. It wasn't an easy decision and I had to weigh the pro's and con's up. Business is tough these days.

All sounds above board ... in this case an R4 board and a Pi5 board lol

Sam x

[rwillett]

I even checked this with my accountant and she was happy about it.

 

The Pi 5 is the first Pi that is actually fast enough for day to day usage and not a toy desktop. The Pi 3 is a great Octoprint server and the Pi 4 even better. I use the 4 for Astrophotography and its fine for controlling loads of things like cameras and mounts. I have tried each of them for desktop use, and you could use the Pi 4 for ssh work and it was fine. The moment a GUI was put on, down it went in performance. The 5 works well, still nowhere near as fast as a good Windows or Mac machine, but it's about £80 from memory. I'd still like a 16GB version though. I'd always go more memory over more CPU power.

 

If anybody wants an Arduino R3, lightly used, let me know and I'll pop it in the post.

 

Rob

[neepheid]

28 minutes ago, rwillett said:

I even checked this with my accountant and she was happy about it.

 

The Pi 5 is the first Pi that is actually fast enough for day to day usage and not a toy desktop. The Pi 3 is a great Octoprint server and the Pi 4 even better. I use the 4 for Astrophotography and its fine for controlling loads of things like cameras and mounts. I have tried each of them for desktop use, and you could use the Pi 4 for ssh work and it was fine. The moment a GUI was put on, down it went in performance. The 5 works well, still nowhere near as fast as a good Windows or Mac machine, but it's about £80 from memory. I'd still like a 16GB version though. I'd always go more memory over more CPU power.

 

If anybody wants an Arduino R3, lightly used, let me know and I'll pop it in the post.

 

Rob

 

I use my spare Pi 3 as a wireless repeater, our Roku streaming stick hates our router for some obscure reason even though it's in the same room so had to find a workaround.  Got a Pi 4 lying around, wonder what task I can put it to. I will probably just redo my RetroPie installation and really curate that collection of SNES roms

[rwillett]

The Pi 4is fine for non GUI use, so make it a proxy server or an Octoprint server (TBH it's over powered for an Octoprint) or anything where it doesn't need to run a large GUI. A retro games server, it's also a pretty good file server if you can get a decent NVME or SSD on it. The Pi 4 is a lot more powerful than the Marvel chip I had in my Synology server, I reckon my washing machine had a faster CPU.  No issues as a webserver or to learn python or whatever you fancy.

 

Rob