Interstitial Firmware Releases

[g33tCode]

@dlang

it’s a good thing the machine is warning you

Oh man I wish it warned me! It took a lot of careful/lucky manual observation to notice this.

Your comment reminds me of another observation. During initial assembly and testing I would pull on the cable during retraction to trigger the threshold causing it to stop. I did this for different voltage thresholds and at different times in the retraction ramp up. I can tell you the tension is very different when retraction starts vs when it is winding full speed. The voltage is the same but the tension was much weaker at the start of retraction. I would urge caution about equating voltage threshold with assumed tension. I’m not sure this is fully accounted for in the firmware. Though this effect seemed to be greatly reduced at the higher thresholds.

@dlang

1. you can increase the limit in the settings.
2. you can excercise the arm (extending/retracting the belt) to see if a little
   bit of wear makes it move more easily.
3. you can remove the arm and see if there is anything you can do to make it
   move more smoothly (are the bolts too tight? can you add some of the silicon
   lube? is there anything else ‘odd’ about the arm?

I think that until you solve the belt not being tight enough, nothing else
matters.

I’ve addressed it by point 1, continued patience by point 2 and experience/reluctance to undertake point 3. At least 2 of those calibrations were mitigated with the higher limit (the first column in the table) and I feel confident with the observed tension that they were good measurements. I thought the same as you, I was very hopeful for a good calibration after bumping up the voltage threshold. I just knew that was the silver bullet… Now I have some data that shows good fitness with low threshold setting and poor fitness with consistently good tension. ¯\(ツ)/¯

@dlang

it really doesn’t look like any belts are ‘compliant’

This clued me in to it:

if(orientation == VERTICAL){
        axisTL.recomputePID();
        axisTR.recomputePID();
        axisBL.comply();
        axisBR.comply();
    }

After that I paid attention to it and observed it in all the rest of my calibrations. You can feel it feed out more belt when you pull on it during travel. You can see it stop if you help relieve the weight of the belt.