LitePlacer-rmod Updates

[Covert]

Juha, what is your plan regarding the further maintenance and enhancement of the software?

I believed you wanted to take ownership of version 2 but honestly did not observe much activitiy in that direction.

I do appreciate Reza's work but believe development should not just stop here.

There are currently 27 documented issues which could be addressed:
https://github.com/jkuusama/LitePlacer-ver2/issues

Many ideas and enhancement requests have been discussed in the forums. Do you keep a backlog of future functionality and have any roadmap you could share? I think current users and future customers would appreciate that.

Could you at least migrate the software sources to GitHub, so it is easier for people to fork the repo and post pull requests for their changes? I am afraid we will end up with many isolated, disjunct versions otherwise.

Thank you and best regards
Malte

I am also wondering on this topic. I ahve made local changes and bug fixes and would like to return them back into the project and be able to help develop this further.

[Knas]

My problem has nothing to do with homing, it happens after a while. I've checked the $sys settings and everything seems to be in order. Should i disable the power management of the TinyG entirely?

[JuKu]

Juha, what is your plan regarding the further maintenance and enhancement of the software?

My plan is to first finish what I am doing on my version of the software. There are some new features and fixes, and I am going to publish that as an "official" new user version soon. That is almost done, but needs some more testing. Also, I need to write documentation for the new features. In fact, the software needs a reference manual, where each feature is explained in a form that you can actually find it, like going through each page function by function.

Once that is done, I will go into Reza's version. I'll add the features from rev 1, fix the issues and so on. That version is sufficiently different from mine, that I expect learning it and getting productively with it will take some time.

I believed you wanted to take ownership of version 2 but honestly did not observe much activitiy in that direction.

True. I have worked on my branch that I know. In the meanwhile, I have looked at the side and not interfere with version 2 development. It seems that Reza is busy on other things now, so maybe it is time:

Could you at least migrate the software sources to GitHub, so it is easier for people to fork the repo and post pull requests for their changes? I am afraid we will end up with many isolated, disjunct versions otherwise.

So I have done that today.

[Knas]

Finally getting to get my pnp to behave somewhat, but i have a few questions in regards to the r-mod software;

There doesn't seem to be any way of setting the "y to part"-value in the tape definitions, it's always stuck at -3.5mm which isn't going to work for 12mm or 16mm tape, what's the deal with this? I've tried aligning the components using component photos instead in order to make it work, tho that function seems really wonky and only works very sporadically?

I'm still getting random time outs every once in a while, i've made sure the settings are like they should. It seems the software sometimes gets a little stuck while trying to perform certain operations, i can sometimes solve this by enabling and disabling motor power during the operations. Anyone else got this issue?

It seems the pickup and placement Z's are being recalculated every once in a while, is there a reason for this?

Thanks

[Knas]

Quick question; i've gotten the placement to work with 12mm tapes with caps using the image recognition, but i'm having trouble with the 16mm tape / 14-pin opamps. I'm thinking it might be because it's a black part on black tape. Any hints on what type of image / camera settings to use? I'm not sure i understand exactly how the recognition routine works so..

[mrandt]

Quick question; i've gotten the placement to work with 12mm tapes with caps using the image recognition, but i'm having trouble with the 16mm tape / 14-pin opamps. I'm thinking it might be because it's a black part on black tape. Any hints on what type of image / camera settings to use? I'm not sure i understand exactly how the recognition routine works so..

Have you tried to use sprocket hole detection and part offset instead? I am not sure 16mm tape and corresponding offset is in the program yet - but should be easy to add.

[Knas]

Yeah as far as i can tell there's no way of changing the y offset to part, i tried doing it manually in the config file but that was ignored. maybe ill try my hands on modding the software, not too familiar with it yet.

[Covert]

@Knas. I added my own 12mm and 16mm tape. It's not that hard, Tell us if you are not sure and I can give you my changes for 12 and 16mm tape. I would do it now but I'm not in front of that machine.

Only this-morning I was thinking of this problem. It would be nice to have a tapetype.xml file that can be manually edited.

Optical part detection is not working great for me, I have clear 12 and 16mm tape with electrolytic capacitors. Of 16 is gets about 12 or 14 of them. Not bad but not perfect. I found results much the same with all 3 downwards cameras I have tried. If the Exposure and Vid Brightness settings work then use those to lock in those settings for Component Picture filter.

I've been playing with the part detection code to get better results. I need more time with it.

[Knas]

Juha

I would love to have that code, apart from that i'm pretty much ready to start doing some real-life tests with my machine so

[mrandt]

I would love to have that code

Reza's rmod (aka Version 2):
https://github.com/jkuusama/LitePlacer-ver2

Juha's original version:
https://github.com/jkuusama/LitePlacer