May ’17 AtCore Update.

Its been some time since I’ve posted any progress for AtCore. Some may wonder what we have been up to ..

• Implimented a Comand Queue

We would like to get some info from the printer while printing we need to have some method of flow control. AtCore now uses a command queue to send all commands. With the command Queue in place we have to handle stop and Emergency stop differently . For example Emergency Stop should skip the queue and be sent as soon as the button is pressed.

• Requesting Temperatue from the printer

After you connect to a FW plugin every 5 seconds a m105 will be send to the printer and the temperature results are put onto a pretty graph that Patrick made. In order to make the graph work we need read the M105 return and extract the data from it. While our current methods of parsing this info work its very specific to each firmwares return . Since these string can be differnt between fw versions it can crash so we are working on a way to do this better.

• Cleaned up the test Client Gui

The test clients GUI needed some love. All the widgets now live within a dock and the docks can be arranged how ever the user likes. I’ve also added a status bar to show the status of AtCore. We’ve also added a print job timer and remaining print time estimate. A Seperate axis control for relative was asked for by a user and I’ve added one that Lays wrote some time ago . It works well and allows for movements on 1, 10 or 25 units

• Fixed the windows build so that It builds and deploys correctly via craft

Lays has been working hard to get atcore buildable via craft. Now we can build and deploy AtCore (and testgui) from craft. After building we had a problem of not finding the plugins on windows and them not deploying to the correct path.I added some instructions for deploy and tweaked plugin detection on window. Everything is now working well.