Greetings from Austria and Ideas for vPIP

[Chris Tarantl]

Hello MakeBmth,
My name is Chris, me and my fellow friends and I are inventing things at MakerAustria.at  Makerspace.
I am following, trying, testing, creating, coding, assembling Drawing robots for quite some years now and after giving up on gocupi (go is just too crappy for me) i found your vPIP project and have my test setup in front of me. (modified a bit since i did a mutation with an arduino and a cnc shield for easier assembling)
... python code currently is not sending anything over serial on my raspberry, but i'll somehow solve this

I read that you plan to do a MQTT version of vPIP and this caught my attention.
Why not take some ESP8266 - add two A4988 - rewrite sketch for drawing and add wifi and pubsubclient for mqtt and start drawing wirelessly without some i2c or other connection...
I would love to support you in that project if time allowes me.

The major drawback of all Drawing solutions so far is the dependence on too many crazy Programs and scripts.
I'd love to bring a friend of mine to the project who is a web-frontent and node backend professional.

(What we already tried was to send svgs over mqtt, catch them with a node-red instance on the raspberry and then let gocupi draw that stuff - but gocupi is some unfinished stuff and does not really draw reliably, apart from pen-up/down issues and no possibility to move without drawing.)

Last but not least - if you are in Vienna some time ... just pay a visit at MakerAustria :D

Cheers
Chris

[Mark Benson]

Hi Chris,

Sounds like interesting stuff! And that looks like a very cool Maker
space!

I should really update our blog with where are are at with the drawing
machine...

The current plan is to use the ESP32.

I've started work on some hardware that uses the ESP32:
https://github.com/MarkJB/esp32-stepper-board/tree/devkitc . This branch
is for test/firmware/software development purposes and uses the ESP32
DEVKITC.

There is some debate over external dependencies at MakeBmth.

I'm also of the opinion that these things rely on too much setup,
configuration and hard to use scripts and would like to see the drawing
machine run independently of the control software once started.

Ultimately I would like to see the ESP32 provide an API that a Web App
can call against. Upload some gcode and start plotting (which continues
even if the web app is closed). But thats easy for me to say as I'm not
developing the software!

If it can also support MQTT that would be cool, we have an interesting
use case that MQTT could facilitate but its currently another thing a
user has to setup/configure.

I have a few spare PCBs for the ESP32 devkitc board. If you are
interested, shout and i'll put one in the post. But be Warned, the
boards need a few mods that I still need to document.

Cheers,

Mark

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[Mark Benson]

This might not be applicable to your hardware, but we have to manually
reset the arduino to start comms with vPiP after we see the __VPIP
CONNECTED__ message. Then serial comms should start.

[Chris Tarantl]

Hey Mark,
Thanks for this update - this really sounds awesome and probably we can really team up for some things necessary to get things running. Using an ESP32 sounds very nice (i didn't dare to write esp32 because most of the people still use a 8266) and thanks for the offer - i have several models here in my drawer from bare to battery-with-oled.

Could we share some code on this?  as soon as my wireless barBot "TheBarBender" is ready and tested fully i am happily supporting https://photos.app.goo.gl/cj3phSsyckC6UE3h2

Cheers
Chris

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[Chris Tarantl]

Thanks - will try this some time...
currently pinning together a protoboard with esp32, stepsticks, nema17 and a servo for testing things.
AND a different approach came into my mind -> MQTT for steering and telemetry back and as trigger to download the necessary code to spiffs memory of the esp which then can operate standalone for hours without being dependant on wifi connection.

:D

[Mark Benson]

Awesome project!

I don't think we have any code yet. Should be something on github in a
few weeks.

Will post to the list/forum when there is an update.