#438 – An Interview with Bart Dring

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Welcome, Bart Dring!

• Hobby of motion contollers and CNC
• Got started at Williams pinball (who also make games like Joust and Space shuttle)
• A lot of wear in pinball cabinets.
• Got the itch to move onto a “real engineering” job.
• Microwave for deep space networks
• Multi kilowatt units with high power dissipation
• Waveguide switches
• Getting heat out of the potting
• Used on things like news trucks and DSN satellites.
• Military specs for harsh environment
• CNC machines were discussed by past guests:
  • John Saunders
  • Nadya Peek
• Sending steps to machines was easier with a parallel port. Now need something like a USB to parallel.
• Started doing tutorials on Instructables, wanted to win a contest with a human powered Segway to win Epilog laser.
• Started to document along the way on Buildlog.net
• First comprehensive laser cutter kit out there, the 2.x laser sold 400 kits
• Maker Slide was a system for building machines. The Kickstarter raised $25K
• Since it was open source, others re-started KS campaigns 5 times around the world
• Factory for extrusion is like 300m long
• Wrote a yield optimizer to spit out a better way to cut material in his garage.
• Laen (OSH Park) also talked about optimizers when he was on the show.
• Approached Inventables to fulfill Maker Slide orders.
• Worked out a deal for a royalty, they still pay it on orders.
• Inventables makes Easel, which is a web based program for working with their routers.
• Inventables also took on the Shapeko, designed by Edward Ford. That machine is made out of Maker Slide.
• GRBL is the motion controller behind all of Bart’s CNC machines.
• It started with the creator interested in optimizing the code to put on an Arduino.
• RAMPS controllers
• Plug in stepper drivers
• G-code
• Bart ported GRBL onto PSoC5
• Why PSoC5? Bart likes the graphical interface and uses it a lot for prototyping.
• Motion planner
• Started looking at ESP32 for Bluetooth/WiFi
• Robots run off the phones
• Angus doing Arduino stuff for Espressif helped to move things along.
• API has public functions for RTOS, so it was harder in a real time control sense.
• Plan was to use primary core for GRBL, other core for communication.
• Bart put the project down for a while, but Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm) convinced him to try again.
• The processor had a lot more RAM than other boards, especially Arduino.
• Finished September 2018
• Tindie sales
• Complete web UI for sender
• Web page has jogging controls and configuration
• Hoping to put an Easel-like program on there
• Nickelbot
• Square coasters with traction feed (Coasty the Coaster Toaster)
• Exotic kinematics
• Polar coaster
• Converting polar to Cartesian coordinates
• Drawbot badge
• Hobby servos
• “Adorably wiggly lines“
• Workshop at Supercon
• Scripting in python
• Polar Platform String Art Machine
• Open loop vs closed loop
• Twang
• Follow Bart on twitter as @buildlog