User Manual: Host Software

From RepRap
Revision as of 21:57, 18 February 2010 by TheOtherRob (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search
This page has not yet finished being moved from TWiki to this MediaWiki. While we are in the process of moving it please refer to DriverSoftware


Please Note this page describes how to use the RepRap standard software. There are alternatives to the standard software available and these are listed on the Comparison of RepRap Toolchains.


Troubleshooting

  • If you are having trouble with any of the axis' make sure you check your Cartesian-bot for mechanical problems (friction, alignment) and check to see if your Electronics are working properly.

Setting Host Port Preferences when using Windows

To find out which COM port the USB or serial port is using, go to the Windows Control Panel (Start -> Control Panel) and then the Hardware Manager (System -> Hardware -> Device Manager). Scroll down to Ports (COM & LPT) and expand the tree by clicking on the plus sign. There you should see something to the effect of a Communications Port (COM1) and USB Device (COM5). It may not be COM5 on your machine it all depends on how Windows addressed it when you installed the drivers

Then use search to find the reprap.properties file. Right click and edit. Search for Port(name) and change to match your com number. This must be in caps without spaces. Mine for example is Port(name)=COM4.

Save the changes.

package org.jdesktop.layout does not exist

This apparently means Ant or Eclipse or whatever environment you are building from can't find Netbeans.

To get Ant to work I did the following:

   find / -iname '*swing-layout*jar' 2>/dev/null

This spits back the location of the netbeans package. For me it was "~/projects/reprap/Reprap/lib/swing-layout-1.0.3.jar".

Next I opened up ~/projects/reprap/Reprap/build.xml I then edited the javac element to contain the netbeans package in the classpath:

       <javac source="1.5" target="1.5" destdir="bin">
           <src path="src"/>
           <classpath>
               <path refid="project.classpath"/>
               <path location="lib/swing-layout-1.0.3.jar"/>
           </classpath>
       </javac>

I'm not sure this is the best way, but it got things working for me.


Using reprap software on ubuntu karmic amd64

The reprap software comes with rxtx and java3d binaries needed for 32bit arcitectures so getting the reprap software working on amd64 either means installing 32bit version of java or installing native 64bit versions of the libraries. For the latter option here is how you can set it up.

For java3d its a simple these can simply be installed using

sudo apt-get install libjava3d-jni

For rxtx you can download binaries for the latest pre release version here expand the zip using

unzip Downloads/rxtx-2.2pre2-bin.zip

copy the 64 bit binary to /usr/lib

sudo cp rxtx-2.2pre2-bins/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/librxtxSerial.so /usr/lib

Now all that has to be done is to soft link these libs to where the reprap software expects them to be

cd  reprap-mendel-20100105
rm libj3dcore-ogl.so
rm librxtxSerial.so
ln -s /usr/lib/jni/libj3dcore-ogl.so libj3dcore-ogl.so
ln -s /usr/lib/librxtxSerial.so librxtxSerial.so

GilesBathgate 10:50, 16 January 2010 (UTC)