11/9/19

The Firmware is Done!

The Arduino firmware is able to fire solenoids, move the steppers, and perform other essential actions like homing and loading paper. The stepper control is an extension of the Arduino Accel Stepper library which allows control of acceleration and automatically supports absolute positioning. I extended this library with classes for each of our two steppers to specify all the other functions that are not already built in. The entire machine is controlled by a serial interface which takes commands over serial in a GCODE-like format and performs the appropriate actions. The full documentation for the firmware can be found in the firmware user guide. We also created a more complex test stand with both steppers and several solenoids so we could test coordination between them.