by Here is the latest update regarding ATXPiHat as of 02/19/2018.
There has been a lot going on in the past week or so. The board release went pretty well. However, Tindie has been a real pain with getting the item listed. This should be done in the next day or so. I have no idea why they go through the review process that they do. As soon as it is listed, I will notify all of the waiting folks that it is live. I will eventually put up my own site for this. The fees to do this are just unbelievable. ebay/Paypal are really expensive. Everyone has their hand out and they take more and more of the pieces.
Justin has been working with the board for the last several days and is not having any major issues. One item, that we will take care of in the next hardware release is the switch bounce in the EPO (Emergency Power Off). Essentially, when you press a button, any button, it transitions from one state to the other slowly. Meaning that you do not get an immediate change. Due to the nature of the Pi, it picks up on this change and gives some intermittent power changes. I talked about this in the original release information. To resolve this, a 100nf capacitor across the leads on the switch should take care of it. The software has a 400 microsecond delay between the time it starts to see the change and the actual change. This has helped.
I have updated the Octoprint plugin to 1.0.5 with a few additional pieces and some updates. Here are the highlights;
- Update to the ADC controller for better control of the sampling
- Better and faster Amperage and Voltage sampling
- Replacement of the MCP342X driver with something dedicated to this specific purpose, Thank you Steve for the great work.
- Implementation of Amperage Overload monitoring and shutdown
- Implementation of GCODE driven RGB LED support (M150 R0 G0 B0)
- General refactoring of the code for better reuse
There is more to come. Steve and I are already working on several variants of this design. Some are stripped down, another has more amperage capability for bigger printers, and one that is specific to Pi Zero’s. I have been working on some additional designs for a fan holder and should have those up in a week or so. If we get enough interest, I will put together a kit with all of the external items, fan, EPO, etc. Please let me know what your thoughts are.
In will be attending the 2018 Midwest RepRap festival in Goshen, IN on March 24th, 2018. I will also be bring boards with me for anyone that would like to purchase them at the show. Obviously, this will save on shipping. Please look me up, I will be around. I will not be taking a table or anything so structured. I will not have the ability to take credit cards. Cash or Paypal only. I have not setup a Vimeo account yet, but if I have time before the show I will get it put together. I may also add a Tindie link with no shipping specifically for the show. Any ideas that you would like to share with me regarding this or any other design that we are working on is always appreciated.
If you are interested in purchasing one of these, please contact me to get on the list and I will let you know as soon as they are available on Tindie.
Warm regards,
Brian
