With all due respect (honestly!), it seems to me that Mr bteddy should get off his high-expectations pedestal and roll up his sleeves to do his own work instead of expecting it from others like it’s some sort of commercial operation.
Open source means everyone can contribute, including you. But don’t EXPECT anyone to contribute! They do so out of their own good will, not to serve you.
If the documentation is lacking in your strong opinion then get off your own arse and fix it yourself! Get a machine. Build it. Take it to bits. Make the measurements and post them in some documentation. No one will stop you doing like they might do if the product was proprietary. But why should anyone else do it? Do it yourself - you’re owed nothing.
To Bar, Orob, dlang (and more I haven’t named who haven’t posted to this thread specifically), your continued support of others in these forums for free doesn’t go unnoticed and your posts have helped many souls. Thank you for your contributions.
Signed,
Happy Maslow tinkerer who thinks the openness of the project is one of the very best parts about it!
I don’t think you have a good understanding of the history of the Maslow project. As someone who has participated in it from it’s kickstarter days, let me offer my observations.
Yes, that is exactly how it happened and exactly how it should have happened. That was the intent of THIS particular open source project at least. The fact that it wasn’t documented in the manner that you expect isnt their fault. The Maslow project isn’t a Phd disertation, it’s a high school shop class.
This project was never a profit driven enterprise, @bar may have had plans for it to be at one point but for whatever reason, they didn’t materialize. As such there was no real documentation or configuration control scheme deployed. Had this been a commercial operation, there would have been a structured, revision control systems utilized. The modifications to the mechanical design and software modifications would have been thoroughly vetted and the standard Maslow design would have been updated. There would have been an adherence to design basis principles.
This project, from day one, has always been a group of people buying kits and doing fuck’al whatever they wanted with them. It was always subject to the whims of the individuals involved and the time contraints under which they were working. If someone had the time to document their findings, great. If not, well thats knowledge lost to time. The best we could hope for was a quick forum post detailing what they found to leave a breadcrumb for someone in the future. Barring that then what we got were community driven updates to either the Maslow firmware or the control software (Ground Control, Web Control). Since each Malsow build is a unique, and in some cases a grossly modified version of the original Maslow design developed by @bar, there is no such thing as a standard Maslow. Which means there is no Maslow standard to maintain.
There has never been a steering committee or some cabal to keep things on the rails and enforce standards. Memebers who were extremly active at the beginning have all but dropped off the face of the earth by now. Others have hung on and still provide institutional knowledge. Everyone else has been free to contribute to this effort however we wanted or could. The project provided basic guidance to get a machine set up and built but that was about it. From that point everyone pretty much went in their own direction and documented what they did if time and capability allowed.
Sometimes you can’t see the forrest through the trees. The community is all around you. The core firmware has been so heavily modified by the community that @bar can’t tell you how many parts of it even work. Web Control was developed by the community to replace Ground Control when GC became obsolete. Web Control is currently undergoing a major revision and update by @orob and the community as we speak, specificaly so it doesnt become abandon-ware. @blrfl and many others in the community quickly developed upgraded shield designs to replace the first generation model that was marginaly designed at best (sorry @bar). I myself spent 400 hours in that specific effort, with @bar even helping me! @dlang and others developed the spreadsheet that greatly standardized the design of the Maslow geometry and removed a whole lot of guesswork.
My point is you are judging the entirty of the Malow project based on a set of statndards that don’t apply to it. For four+ years the community was focused on just getting the thing to work and then, work better. In that respect then we have been wildly successfull. This thing shouldn’t work, but it does and does so remarkebly well. Performing a detailed reverse engineering exercise on the motor gearbox was not a priority. Documenting design basis simply was not a concern.
The communities input into the Maslow may not exist as a white paper or a design basis document. Instead it exists as what must be by now tens of thousands of forum posts as well as firmware and software revisions. Oh, and the people themselves. Is this an efficient way of running a project? Hell no. It sucks because so many lessons have been learned and forgotten or learned but never shared. It can take hours to research and solve a problem, only to find that the answer to the problem was found three years ago. If anything, this method of running a project is proof that n-stage libertarianism or communsim or any political ideology for that matter, will eventualy evolve into bloated and inflexible ideologies that will fail under the weight of their own inefficiency. But I digress.
What you are asking for is a detailed design package that fully documents every aspect of the current Maslow standard. That’s a great idea. My only question is, which one do we pick? What you are also asking for is a road map to the destination. I can’t speak for anyone else but I have been part of this for four years+ for the journey. I’ve met some awesome poeple, mastered Fusion 360 and AutoCAD, learned a bit of python, learned EagleCAD and how to get PCB’s manufactured. Oh, and after 25 years in the automation industry, have finaly figured out the most basic of ways to explain the three elements of PID control to the layperson. By the way, I just got a job specificaly because I knew Fusion and CAM which I wouldn’t have learned without having participated in Maslow. So THANKS @bar and the community for, you know, a career.
I am fortunate to live in a part of the US where we still do a yearly town meeting. Every year, there is always the jackass who stands up and spends his or hers five minutes just complaining about this or that. They offer no solutions or any ideas what so ever. They sit down and are for the most part ignored because they are offering no controibutions to the community.
I echo @macgeeknz suggestion above in that if you have found a deficiency in how the Maslow community has handled the documenting of the engineering of the machine then:
Understand we are ALL aware of this particular defficiency so you haven’t exactly uncovered a great conspiracy.
Determine what the current Maslow standard should be and then find a few thousand hours to go back in time and review the extensive forum history to determine how it got there.
Budget a few thousand more hours to doccument it thoroughly. With detailed drawings and design data of all the critical components and software involved. Including a complete reverse engineering of all mechanical components and white papers that describe How the Maslow firmware functions and just what all the elements within it do.
You are absolutely correct. When I was looking at building my own maslow, there was a list of parts but no sources. I was creating pull requests against the repo and finding independent sources of the parts. I was able to get the manufacturer to send 2 sample motors from china and once I had them I thought it would be nice to know more about their insides. I opened them up and wanted to share what I found. What a rotation to pulse ratio was and what parts inside might fail.
you were included because you were part of one of the many…… many…… many forum posts he linked to. Given the age of some of them, i would guess hundreds of people had their inbox implode. You are not alone
That’s all the information that the manufacturer provides.
I can’t seem to find stats for the whole forums easily, but I can see that I have personally read 5.9k topics and 64.2k posts which seems like most of them.
@bteddy please try to be a little less combative. I don’t think you are going to make a lot of friends walking in and complaining. We’re here to help if you are nice to us, but we’re not here to get abused.
Wow.
There are things I don’t know and could not find definite answers to in the forums. As one member above stated, “some members figured some things out and shared. Other members figured things out and kept it to themselves.”
Things I think are common sense, especially after 7 years are not there. Like documenting “things figured out” in one common area so that doesn’t have to be “figured out” again and time and resources can be used on the next problem…
worm gear 2:25
next stage 10:35
next stage 9:29
final stage 18:37
648:187775 (and it does not factor smaller)
factor in the encoder (7*4) and you get
162 revs per 1314425 encoder steps or 8113.7345679012 encoder steps/rev
so we have been off by 0.42% in our measurement of all chain lengths, or around 10-12mm in motor spacing measurements (and at about 1500mm of chain, one tooth off)
no wonder we have been going nuts trying to get things accurate
We owe a LOT to the people who reported the positioning error
using 8114 results in an error of 0.00327%, which over 3000mm translates into an error of 0.098mm, which should be close enough (8113.7 would result in an error of 0.013mm over that same distance)
Can someone please change this and set their machine to spin for a while and validate this?
End Example
So, I asked a question. Most questions are responded to, some never are. If you think a question can be insulting, combative or abusive, there is nothing I can do about that.
Don’t reply to a question with a question. especially “WHY”, or “it doesn’t matter”. If you don’t know, say you don’t know. If you don’t have the information, say that. If it’s an “off the shelf” or “preassembled only” item .
give the model # and manufacture.
It was just a question to get information I thought you should have, stop being so sensitive and reading in insults that are not there.
As for my Maslow machine contributions, no I haven’t made any yet. I am just starting out and don’t have all the basic data I would like to have and concepts I would like to understand before I start anything. So, I have no insights or comments to offer. As for my Maslow suggestions, they are in the replies marked with “Example” “End example”.
As I said in the very first post, Thanks for the work you put in.
To those that offered information, thank you.
To those that offered information and criticism, thank you for the information
To those that have/had criticisms but didn’t reply, thank you.
.
Compiled items like this are typically captured in one of the wiki entries if determined they are of great value and need to be archived for easy access. Much of the effort has been software features, beginner setup issues, and such, so those are captured there. For specific motor details as you just showed, you could make the wiki entry and ask for help to fill it in. The community power in this will reveal itself as those who know will pop out of the woodwork and share what they may not have thought anyone else cared about. A new entry in the wiki or a subsection on the manual would be appropriate to carve out a space and fill in the information. I’m happy to help. I started the manual because the forum format has data everywhere organized chronologically and a systematic subject treatment made more sense to me. The motor information is not in there because I never needed to know that information. Whatever you find and can add would be appreciated. How can I help?
