It’s a trailer for the Kickstarter, showing one of the applications that it can be used for. The application is called Karma-button, an app for giving creds to others in your makerspace. The screen has become a part of an installation in the entrace of Bitraf, where it is mounted on a plank with a lot of history. The video shows some of this history as well as the screen in use.

The Kickstarter will actually launch two similar screens, one 5.9″ 1080p screen and one 4.8″ 720p version. Both having cell-phone quality Sharp IPS LCD panels, HDMI input, Synpatics capacitive 10-finger touch chips using OCA bonding. Just like the previous Manga Screen, the USB is used for powering the screen, setting the backlight and for interfacing with the touch panel.

Comparing this with the previous Manga Screen, that was a 800×480 (SVGA) panel with a two touch FocalTech touch panel. The old Manga Screen is still way ahead of many of the offerings out there, but the two new screens will definitely be an improvement over existing solution.

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…ideally with a fold down Manga Screen fitted on top, ready for Intel’s big event Geek So In #10 on December 8.

I was inclined to oblige, since they are so heavily invested in open source and trying really hard to make their way on to the maker scene with their Edison, Arduino 101.  the Intel NUC might also be an effort towards that, having the pay-off “what will you make?” on the side of the box.

So what is it?

The Intel NUC is a small computer, high in power, small in form factor. Also, it has a replaceable lid something I only found out after having spent several hours designing and printing something that would mount to the back side of the thing. I guess I should have read the “getting stared” pamphlet that came with it. I’m really kicking myself for not doing that, would be great to see something that looked like it belonged. I might have to ask for one back…

What did I do?

I mounted a Manga Screen on there. Added a couple of hinges as well, so it folded down for easy transport. If you want to do this, make sure you connect to the internet after starting up, so Windows 10 can do an update and get the timings for the right resolution. Apparently, making this work with the native 800×480 @ 60 Hz does not work out of the box.

What can it be used for?

So compared to Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black etc. this one has a lot of power. Very nice if you just want to make something like a DIY like/dislike button for your company as the customers are leaving your store, a quick and easy internet radio so your kids can listen without having the Internet, the base for a home automation system, you name it. It is about ten times the price of a Raspberry Pi, but the use cases are different. The thing is, with the replaceable lid it’s easy to 3D print something that actually looks good and yet is customized for your application. I using it for timing my coffee brew, that worked!

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It’s been a while since I worked on the firmware for Manga Screen, but the last couple of days have been spent making a few changes that have been on my list for several months. the most important news: Persistent storage!

First of all, the EEPROM on the Atmega32U4 is now utilized, adding persistent storage across reboots. That means Brightness, debug level and touch panel coordinate system is retained, after it has been set though the Command Line Interface (CLI). Having such a big chip (and expensive @ ~$6) might seem like overkill for such an easy application, but it is super sweet to work with when doing development. No programmer or separate cable is needed, everything happens over USB. And there is room for adding more functionality.

Secondly, the CLI itself has gotten a makeover, and now uses a library for handling code completion and history as well as proper handling of backspace etc. Admittedly, these are minor improvements, but they do make the board a lot nicer to work with. The library is a smaller version of ReadLine called MicroRL by Eugene Samoylov aka Helius.

Thirdly, the debug level is now dynamic, meaning it can be set via the CLI as well. If you want to see the coordinates and how many fingers are found, set the debug level to 10 and you should see the coordinates being output as you press the touch screen.

There are still some problems with buttons not being released in Windows apparently, still have not gotten around to that. It appears is might be related t to the area and pressure being reported by the finger.

If you have a Manga Screen from the Kickstarter, you can download the latest firmware .hex and .eep files and update the firmware. All you need is a Linux computer.

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It’s still summertime and the weather is high, but in the deep valleys of Shenzhen, three companies are hard at work and getting ready for the second batch of Manga Screens! Almost all the backers from the Kickstarter campaign have gotten their screens, only the party pack backers remain (again, if you are one of those ten backers or my sister, I will make it up to you).

Moar screens

There have been a lot of people saying they missed the campaign, but would love to get their hands on a Manga Screen! This whole time I’ve said they had to wait for the Kickstarter backers to get their rewards, before we start making a new batch. Well, now the beautiful backers have received their pledges, have vented their issues in the comments section and are hopefully being productive making cute embedded nonsense hacks with their shiny new jewels! So today, I’m adding 400 new Manga Screens to the web shop and telling the Chinese to fire up their engines for a new batch!

Even though they are listed as in stock, it is a pre-sale, so it will be about a month before delivery. I’ve written that down on the product page as well. Still, we’ve gotten a lot of requests both from individuals and companies looking to scoop up some screens, so get them while stocks last!

Big ups to the pixelbackers

I’m also using this opportunity to give the promised thank you to the pixelbacker of the campaign. Like it says on that reward page, you wanted to see the project succeed and it did and you helped with that, so Tom, my favourite marketing guy, thanks for all your work with the campaign and for the 80 kr that tipped the sum across the 300K line! Laird, you are a huge resource to a big number of hardware projects, so thanks a bunch for helping this along as well! Brian, your backing is hugely appreciated! Thanks for being such a great resource to all entrepreneurs and artists with a dream, you help that come true! Mattias, you crazy Swede, keep backing the tech projects you love! Allan, going on a rampage with backing I see! Great! Ping me when you have a new KS yourself, and I will contribute what I can! Dustin, too bad you could not get a screen, but thank you for pitching in to make this a reality at least! Fredrik, you are one of my oldest and best friends and so it’s wonderful to see you pull out your card and make a donation!

Get in touch

This picture is from one of New York monuments, the Brooklyn Bridge! Øyvind and I are staying there now so if you are in town look us up, we like coffee as much as the next guy and are always ready for a chat about hacking, 3D-printing and electronics!

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Kamikaze is a Debian-based eMMC flasher image for BeagleBone Black. It is a complete solution for Replicape and Manga-Screen aiming to contain all software needed to slice a model and print it without installing any additional software. And it has now been updated!

The latest image has an updated Octoprint 1.2 which now has CuraEngine as a plugin simplifying the slicing of models. So now, you can upload Cura slicer profiles directly from Octoprint.  Further, I’ve made a plugin for Redeem, meaning that you can also import Redeem config files and restart redeem from the Octoprint settings window.

The new image also has the ADC bug removed that was present in the last release. There is also support for Replicape Rev B1, of which there only exists one prototype 🙂 This image also has Linux kernel 4.1.0-bone9 with cape manager, so the right device tree is loaded based on the EEPROM on your cape.

There are still a few things I want to fix in an upcoming version, namely having the zeroconf plugin for Octoprint work out of the box, so there will probably be another distro coming in a while. Also, a big project will be better integration between Octoprint and Toggle so it is possible to see which model is printing and progress on both screens.

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In other news, Octoprint 1.1.0 was recently pushed to master and I’ve update the package feed with the latest changes. The most important news is the support for multiple extruders. Here is the complete list.

Redeem has also gone through a couple of changes, most important is an accelertion bug that was found by Boris Lašič and fixed by Mathieu Monney. I’ve therefore tagged version 0.15.0 of Redeem and pushed it to the package feed. I’ve also put these two changes into a new Thing-image (BBB-flasher) which is now available for download: http://wiki.thing-printer.com/index.php?title=Thing_image

Furthermore, I’ve made a flow chart for anyone getting started with Replicape. It can be a daunting task to know the ins and outs of a new system and even just getting some steppers to move. In my opinion the easiest way to get going is to flash the BBB with the Thing image, but if you are more comfortable with the (pre-installed) Debian image, this chart should help with that.

I’ll try to get a Pip package made for easy installation on Debian, it shouldn’t be too much hazzle and it is high on my todo list : )

Also, the zeroth revision of Reason, a hall effect end stop sensor, has been sent in for prototyping. It works with 3.3 V and uses linear hall effect sensors with a comparator, so position can be tuned with a trim pot.

Along with the Reason sensors, Rev A4 of Manga Screen was sent in for prototyping. This has addressed the issue of connector placement, so hopefully this will save some space. I’ve also added a second connector for the digitizer, useful for making custom touch screens.

The post More Replicapes + new Octoprint and Redeem packages appeared first on www.iagent.no.

The most important changes from the last image is the native path planner in Redeem. Mathieu Monney has done an incredible job in porting some of the code from Repetier firmware and adapting it to the PRUs on the BBB.Becuse of the, Redeem had to adapt the GPL 3 license. Toggle has also gone through some changes, and has been re-written in Python to ease the development. And finally the beginning of a Web UI has emerged allowing selection of configuration file and seeing the status of Redeem, Toggle and Octoprint. It’s still early for the thing-frontend (Web UI), but the idea is that this will be the start of a great UX for anyone using Replicape for the first time. So now, all the BSP packages (Redeem, Toggle, Octoprint and Thing-frontend) are written in Python for easy and effortless hacking directly on the BeagleBone.

Distribution:
* Yocto 1.6 (2014.06)

Kernel:
* 3.14.14 with Capemgr

BSP-layer:
* Redeem 0.14.3 — The Replicape Daemon (Native path planner)
* Toggle 0.2 — GUI for 3D-printers suitable for embedded platforms. (Now written in Python)
* Octoprint (latest from Git) — The responsive web interface for your 3D printer
* CuraEngine (latest from git) — A fast G-code slicer

Graphics:
* Clutter 1.9.6
* Cogl-1.8.2
* Mx-2.0
* Mash-0.2

The new image has had a few beta-testers, but can still be considered a development image.

At least one guy is happy with this new image. To quote @jamisnemo:

@AgentBrum Oh boy have I fallen in love with Clutter!! Thank you so much for helping me getting this up and running! You are a life saver!!

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Yes! The Thing/Replicape BBB-flasher image is now finally ready for alfa testing!

This flasher image has everything you need for using the Replicape for controlling a 3D-printer or other CNC-machine. It’s a minimal Angstrom SystemD image with Redeem, Toggle, CuraEngine and Octoprint pre-installed. There is no X or Wayland due to the missing SGX drivers for it so there is plenty of room for STL files that can be sliced to G-code using CuraEngine.

Redeem is still at a beta-stage and Toggle is not even that, but I have included Toggle as well in the release of the image because it makes the whole eco-system more user friendly. With eco-system I mean the ability for easy upgrades from the users perspective and the ability for easy bug-fixing from a developers perspective.

The image is built with Yocto, so there are recipes available for all the software that is currently installed on the image. This makes it _fairly_ easy for anyone to reproduce this image and make similar type images of their own. I’m not saying is a piece of cake, but definitely doable.

The Replicapes have still not shipped. I fumbled the purchase order and the Chinese had some festivities a few weeks back, so the production was delayed, but the latest word from CircuitCo is that they will deliver in a couple of weeks and then we will send them out as soon as they arrive.

Below is a thumbnail for use when linking to this post : )

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The video shows the Thing printer, which is a demo-printer for displaying the capabilities of the Replicape and the Manga Screen and also for developing Spline, which is a all-metal remotely cooled dual Bowden extruder that I’m working on. Here is a picture of the final result:

Like I mention in the video, since there is no cooling of the platform, heavy overhangs tend to fall apart. The workaround for this is to add moar fans, so I guess that is the next step!

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