Processing & ultimaker communication

[elid 0]

Hi everybody.

I'm the really happy owner of an ultimaker since nov 2012.

I'm an artist and coder and would like to make a java processing program to control the ultimaker aka pushing gcode directly to the arduino mega.

I tried endlessly to find some examples of processing skecthes pushing gcode directly but wasn't really successful.

Does anyone there knows how and even if it's possible?

The process I'm working on is:

1. A camera take a picture

2. The pic is vectorize, whith some blur/ canny edge detection maybe some heightmap

3. The processing program would "translate" the 2d coordonates into a 3D with just one layer

4. processing would then push the gcode to ultimaker.

 

[elid 0]

Ok maybe a good option would be to go from openframeworks and not processing?

 

[nick-foley 5]

Should be super simple... I've never done it but isn't it basically sending coordinates over serial? I would poke around the source code of printrun/printcore for a starting point.

Google also turned up this:

http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/GCtrl

Which is super rudimentary, but again, I believe we are just sending coordinates over serial... so the meaty bit of that code is:

port.write(gcode + '\n');

Where gcode is swappable for any GCode command you're interested in sending.

 

[elid 0]

Thanks! I'm definitely gonna give this one a try