Drawbot update, and ShapeOko's first real work

Last night I spent some time in SketchUp designing a pen carrier for the new drawbot.  This morning I exported all the parts to .dxf, pulled them into CamBam+, generated the gcode, and cut parts on the ShapeOko.  Here's the results.

My New Toy Takes its First Steps

About three weeks ago my wife bought me a really cool gift, and tonight my new ShapeOko CNC mill took made its first moves.  The crappy video is it running the ShapeOko "Hello World" job.

Drawbot software on it's way

To paraphrase "Cool Hand Luke" - what we have here, is the ability to communicate!

In this video the comms board and the pen carrier board are connected up and working for the first time.  The comms board connects to my desktop via USB, and is connected to the pen carrier board via RS-485. When I send a command out the USB, you can see the transmit and receive LEDs flash, then the pen carrier board responds by changing the servo's position.

The protocol the boards are running over the 485 link is dead simple right now, and not capable of multi-drop communication.  So, the next step is to implement a new protocol.  The carrier board also only implements binary servo positions up, and down.  The new protocol will give the ability to send data through the link, so I can control how far up/down the pen is.  With this I'll be able to use brush tip markers, and vary the line thickness drawn by the 'bot.