July 24th Update
Happy Wednesday Everyone
This week we have some excellent projects to show off, a potential fix to a stubborn bug and a summary of the newest firmware update.
Forums Highlights
@ISDNiki had quite a productive “lazy sunday morning” and modified a dining room chain into a race car simulator for his son. Absolutely wild idea!
@Aggiehouse is being extremely proactive and has put all of us last-minute-decorators to shame by cutting out some Wise Men for his Christmas nativity set up. Holidays always bring some exciting projects so we’re excited to see these early.
@Frank_Weibenga is still hard at work on his teardrop camper and it's mobile now!
Last but not least, Anna has been working on a bike rack project for an upcoming Youtube video. Building projects is an essential part of finding/replicating any bugs that are reported in the forums and testing firmware updates, but we also want to use the opportunity to produce SVGs that people would want to use for their own projects. So keep an eye out for this bike rack file! Anna will post it in the forums after making a few more tweaks.
Encoder Read Failure Fix - Hot Glue
One of the most tenacious bugs that we have been hunting is called the Encoder Read Failure. It is difficult to replicate and seems to happen at random. Our latest theory is that it is due to sawdust interfering with the connection at the encoders.
Our current fix is to shore up the connection points with hot glue to hold them in place and prevent dust from entering the connection. Why hot glue? Well we hope everyone has easy access to it and it's removable in case you need to take the wires out at some point. Here are some photos.
To add the hot glue, first remove the wires and blast the encoder connection points with some compressed air or computer duster. This will clear out any dust that snuck in there. You should also hit the ends of the wires themselves with compressed air for good measure. Then add a donut of hot glue around the middle of the connector on the encoder wire before snapping it into place. The location is shown below.
This is very important - please don’t fill up the encoder ports with hot glue and then stick the wires in. We know the photos make it look like we did that, but we used the glue donut method.
We are optimistic that this fix will keep the dust out of these connections, but we are still in the testing phase. Let us know if this works for you!
Firmware Release
Light updates this week. We fixed the timing of when the "Calibration Complete" popup will appear so it now shows only at the right time, and added some hover text to make it more clear that the "Define Home" button needs to be pressed and held for 5 seconds to take effect.
@ronlawrence3 also restored some code which was lost by mistake allowing for proper renaming of files on the web-server.
There are no changes to maslow.yaml this week so no need to mess with that file.
You can find v0.81 here as always.
That’s it for this week. Keep up the good work!
-Bar, Roman and Anna
