Debrew

A friend of mine has a new startup and he asked me to help out with a video for his product. Here it is! It shows Debrew 2.0:)

To cuten things up a bit and hopefully also squash a few bugs in the process, I've started working on a version 2.0. The most important changes is the use of open beam and the Kossel mini as a starting point. A spicy detail is having the stepper motors and belts conatined in the top housing and using rods for moving the carriages below the house. I'll also try to include a servo motor with a spoon on it so stirring can be done as well. Three tools, oh my!

Here it is, the video:

Oh, don't you just love it when someone has prepared all the software you need for a project and wrapped it up in a tight little package? Well I sure do, and that's why I have made a complete BeagleBone Black flasher image with all the needed software for making a clone of Debrew. So when you have all the parts printed, the steppers installed, the beans in the container, go to this localtion, and download this image:

http://feeds.thing-printer.com/images/BBB-eMMC-flasher-debrew-v2014-06-2014.08.20.img.xz

The file size should be

125333988

and the md5 sum should be

95720960f462b6f7d3d6bcdadbe0d08d

If you are on a Linux box you can flash the image to a 4GB micro sd card by typing this in a terminal: 

sudo -s 

 xz -dkc BBB-eMMC-flasher-debrew-v2014-06-2014.08.20.img.xz | pv -s 3430m > /dev/sdX 

exit

where sdX is your drive letter. (probably e or f)

Once the flashing process is complete, which should take about five minutes, all the blue leds light up and you can remove the SD card and cycle power.

I'm no designer, let me tell you, but one tool that is very useful for anyone, designer or not is a web page called colourlovers.com. I sometimes use that when doing web development, and also this time for the Debrew project. It's a great place to put together a palette and make patters for it as well. So here is a link to the palette for debrew:

http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/3416876/Debrew

So I've also put together an .ipk for the Debrew embedded UI. This is a Python app written using Clutter and with Gobject introspection for the Python bindings. Right now, the only thing it does is show a logo and post messages comming in.

It does that by listening to a virtual tty device file and once a message is available it is read and posted for 2 seconds. This is actually the implementation of the G-code M117. Debrew is really a CNC machine, and so the daemon running in the background (Redeem) pushes M117 messages to the same virtual tty. So now, starting with an Angstrom V2014.06 distro, or ideally a Thing image (dedicated Debrew image coming soon), try this: 

opkg update

opkg install debrew-app

Thats it! Your screen should lightt up like the picture below. If you have a different resolution, fix that in /etc/debrew/ui.json. 

So I've made an .ipk package of the web user interface for Debrew! This is good news, because anyone who wants to have the latest user interface can install it via the package feed. To install the web UI, simply type 

opkg update

opkg install debrew-frontend

systemctl restart lighttpd

and then, with your favourite browser, go to http://debrew.local to see the familiar UI. No need to manually copy over the files any more! Yay!