looks good. The shield looks really good. I was thinking about making a shield to step all logic to 3.3v so I could use a Due down the road but haven't had time to mess with it. Ive also wondered in the past if I could run solely on a Pi and us the GPIO instead of the arduino but im not sure if step timing would be reliable. Let me know if you can provide instructions for getting the software to run on the Pi -had a few people asking. Thanks for your help and for posting your progress.
https://anninrobotics.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/3D-Printed-AR2α_5.avif
I made some progress with the electronics. I designed a custom shield for the Arduino to incorporate some different components. I have the 24V coming to the board at the bottom, then I have 2 buck converters to get 12V to the Arduino and 5V to the Pi. I ran out of headers so I still need to solder the Pi to the board. I know I had some I/O I wanted to add (buttons, switches, sensors, etc) so I implemented 4 molex connectors also. And then I used screw terminals for the calibration, Pul/Dir wires, and additional I/O. I’m waiting for the resistors to arrive for the limit switches, and then I’ll be able to put it through the paces.
On another note, I’m thinking about reworking the whole J1 assembly. It will be introducing more cost (I ordered a $140 bearing), but it may give me better stiffness with the 3D printed assembly at J1. More to come on that later...
Awesome. Great feedback, thank you
Update for today:
I finally got everything wired up temporarily to test the functionality before continuing. One important note is that I didn’t wire the limit switches per Chris’s instructions. I used only 2 wires, one connected to COM and the other to NO. For the limit switch to work properly with the code, it needs to be pulled to ground (LOW) when open, and at 5V (HIGH) when closed. The 3rd wire (connected to NC) to ground accomplishes that. I did it slightly differently. Since I didn’t have a ground connection, I changed the Arduino code such that the switch closed would be to ground (LOW) and open is at 5V (HIGH) using the Arduino’s internal pull-up resistor. The code was pretty easy to modify - all of the calPin digitalRead commands had to have HIGH/LOW flipped. This reduced the physical wiring. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it this way, or if I’ll incorporate pull-down resistors on the shield I’m going to start working on shortly. Probably the latter...but this got me going along in the meantime.
I’ve been testing everything on Windows, but once I get a little further along I’ll test the full functionality on the RaspberryPi. And then I’ll provide a tutorial on how to get the RPi going.
I saw that Chris posted the 2.0 software, so I may go through that to make it RPi compatible, but for now the focus will be on 1.5. I’m pretty sure I won’t include the Xbox controller functionality on the Pi, but it’ll be helpful to have the trajectory mapping that’s he’s included.
