langbalthazar / gocupi

Polargraph (vertical plotter / drawing machine) written in Go

gocupi

Polargraph (vertical plotter / drawing machine) written in Go. Inspired by Polargraph and drawbot projects, designed with the help of the Dallas Makerspace

Gocupi is different from existing systems in that it uses a Raspberry Pi to do most of the processing instead of relying on a microcontroller to parse commands. This gives it the ability to render complex svg files and patterns that would not fit in memory on a microcontroller.

A kit with all the hardware needed is now available on kickstarter

Check out the project page for a general description, there are also several wiki pages with additional information.

Quickstart Guide

Install Go

The full install guide is on golang.org. For the Raspberry Pi you can download precompiled binaries to avoid the lengthy process of building go from source.

For example, installing go to the default location with a precompiled binary on a raspberry pi just takes 3 commands:

wget http://dave.cheney.net/paste/go.1.3.linux-arm~multiarch-armv6-1.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go.1.3.linux-arm~multiarch-armv6-1.tar.gz
sudo echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin' >> ~/.profile

(You must set GOROOT also if you install go to someplace besides the default /usr/local/go)

Fix the serial communication (for Raspberry Pi)

Change the default serial communication by editing /boot/cmdline.txt and remove references to /dev/ttyAMA0

Disable the getty on that serial port in /etc/inittab by commenting out references to /dev/ttyAMA0

In order to reset the serial communication port we need to sudo reboot

Setup gopath folder

Setup the folder for your gopath and set some path variables

mkdir ~/gopath
sudo echo 'export GOPATH=$HOME/gopath' >> ~/.profile
sudo echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/gopath/bin' >> ~/.profile

Install needed dependency

Install mercurial sudo apt-get install mercurial

Download and build gocupi

From your home directory go get github.com/brandonagr/gocupi

Run gocupi

gocupi The gocupi executable should now be in your $GOPATH\bin folder, you can run the command with no arguments to display the help and what command are available

gocupi setup 1000 700 700 The setup command can be used to initialize the dimensions of the polargraph hardware, the setup is stored in the generated gocupi_config.xml file

gocupi -toimage grid 100 10 The -toimage flag causes the system to draw to an output.png instead of trying to control the stepper motors over serial