Losing steps?

I am running 438.02 (via ChiliPeppr + SPJS 1.7). Actually, this reminds me that I was going to put a huge warning at the top of the firmware upgrade page to remind others (like myself :D) that upgrading your firmware blows away all your settings… now I have a backup. 😉

I have tuned the current pot on the jerky motor up to the limit, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. The two motors had precisely balanced current beforehand, and that used to work great.

It’s pretty baffling.

Saving configuration parameters: I just wrote a small script to take the output of $$ and transform it into the relevant set commands — no big deal. The hard part is remembering to run it!

Chilipeppr vs Coolterm: No change, which is what I expect. Once the TinyG gets G1 Y100 F150 the sender is out of the picture….

I’m not near the machine that drives the TinyG today, but I happened to have a copy of an old TinyG config around, so I just rewrote the script. It’s very short:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
# Usage:
#   TinyG_config_mangler.pl < [input_file]
# Reads a TinyG configuration obtained via $$ and transforms it into
# set commands. Perhaps useful if you want to back up your config in a way
# that is easy to restore later on.
use strict;

# Config words to ignore
my @ignore_words = qw/fb fv hp hw id hv/;
my %ignore_map;
@ignore_map{@ignore_words} = ();

while (<STDIN>) {
	next unless m/^\[([a-z0-9]+)\]\s+.+\s+([\d\.]+)\s+.+$/ or exists $ignore_map{$1};
	print "\$$1=$2\n";
}

Here’s how it runs on my OS X machine:

gp@cheetah:~ % cat tinyg_config_sample.txt 
[1ma] m1 map to axis 0 [0=X,1=Y,2=Z...]
[1sa] m1 step angle 1.800 deg
[1tr] m1 travel per revolution 120.0000 mm
[1mi] m1 microsteps 8 [1,2,4,8]
[1po] m1 polarity 0 [0=normal,1=reverse]
[1pm] m1 power management 2 [0=disabled,1=always on,2=in cycle,3=when moving]
gp@cheetah:~ % ./TinyG_config_mangler.pl <tinyg_config_sample.txt 
$1ma=0
$1sa=1.800
$1tr=120.0000
$1mi=8
$1po=0
$1pm=2

Hope someone finds it useful! Maybe I should put it on the Wiki or something?

As a disclaimer: it’s pretty fragile, and it would be easy for the Synthetos folks to accidentally create a text string that would break that regex. Please use with caution! No warranty, might crash your mill or burn your eye out with your laser cutter, etc.

I think the right way to do it is to change the TinyG firmware to support an “output appropriate set commands” option in addition to $$. I’ll fork the code and see if I can find a relatively easy way to implement that.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 3 months ago by gp.

Good idea, but the belts are at equal tension, as determined by plucking them like guitar strings — the best way to “tune” your Shapeoko. 🙂 (It also wouldn’t explain the jerky motion on only one side.)