An Electronic Leadscrew Controller using a Pi Pico

[WobblyHand]

PCB design completed, fabbed and shipped. Currently at international airport in China...

Hardest part with KiCAD was figuring out how to roll your own symbols and footprints. Routing wasn't bad, neither was making planes, even with splits. Board outlines can be imported from FreeCAD, or any DXF, or you can make them in KiCAD. Had to learn all that on the fly. KiCAD forum was helpful, which was good.

 

[AlanB]

It was long ago, and I quickly tired of error messages in French, and it had lots of bugs, it was early days. I'm sure KiCAD has come a long way since.

Instead I used the free version of DipTrace which was easy to learn and very productive.

 

[WobblyHand]

KiCAD V6 didn't throw any French messages at me. Can't say it always worked as expected, but it got the job done. Forum members were quite helpful in fact. Pretty much like here on HM. Took me about 4 days to start from the ground up to shipping out the gerbers. It helped that this first board wasn't that hard. Most of the time was trying to figure out how to get or make footprints for the Teensy4.1 and the ILI9341 display. Everything else was straightforward.

How is the free version of DipTrace limited?

 

[AlanB]

It's been awhile since I looked at it, as I recall the free had restrictions against for profit use. It wasn't very costly to buy a basic license if you didn't need lots of pins or layers. Non profit license, 500 pins, 2 signal layers (they don't count power planes) is free. The starter is $75 for 300 pins and 2 layers. The lite is $145 for 500 pins and 2 layers. If I recall correctly they only counted through holes as pins, so SMT pads didn't count. No limit on board size which was nicer than Eagle. Autorouting and schematic capture as well as layout is included. Easy to make component footprints. Perpetual license. I haven't looked to see if they are keeping up with updates. I designed quite a few boards for home projects. I haven't fired it up in a long time.

 

[WobblyHand]

Seems that KiCAD can do 32 copper layers and board sizes up to 2.14m x 2.14m with nanometer precision. No pin restrictions, no commercial restrictions. Free. Doesn't have a true auto-router. I was using an auto-router in the 1980's. Schematic capture, and simulation. It's not terrible, but I guess it still retains its French quirkiness.

 

[AlanB]

As I recall KiCAD was a school project for the developer, later it grew into something more. I've heard a lot of complaints, but it doesn't have limits. I generally prefer open software but like with FreeCAD there are some costs that go along with that.

Not having autorouting is disappointing. They always need some help, but it is very nice to have something there for routing. DipTrace's autorouter is nicely integrated which makes the workflow efficient. Probably not as good as a million dollar commercial package, but who can afford that.

It's on my list to try KiCAD again at some point.

 

[trenshi]

Hey! So I skimmed this thread and it looks great, as I've been also curious about using the super capable pico for some spindle sync'd lathe (and otherwise) operations.

Did anyone share any pico code yet, or is there any collaboration page? I'd really love to get started with some basic hardware aspects of this, as the UI and input/output isn't as concerning for me. I'm mainly interested in getting the hardware and baseline software for rotary encoder to stepper sync, because I'm just tinkering.

Anyone have any thoughts on the software, or any corresponding encoder input hardware + software starting points they can recommend for the pico and els?

 

[AlanB]

Welcome to the thread and to the forum! I have been doing some other projects with the Pico W but have not gone further with this ELS. I've mostly been using MicroPython on my Pico projects thus far but for maximum performance one of the other toolsets may be helpful. In the past I've done Arduino projects including Arduino on Teensy so I might use that toolset, but there are some other choices now that I haven't looked at like Platform I/O. I generally prefer lightweight tools, but some of these setups are pretty large and thus bring a learning curve. It would be great to see some progress on a Pico solution. There has been major progress on a Teensy solution in another thread here and that's worth looking at. One challenge on the Pico is reading the encoder. Finding or writing some code to utilize the Pico state machines might be perfect for that.

 

[Spajo]

As I recall KiCAD was a school project for the developer, later it grew into something more. I've heard a lot of complaints, but it doesn't have limits. I generally prefer open software but like with FreeCAD there are some costs that go along with that.

Not having autorouting is disappointing. They always need some help, but it is very nice to have something there for routing. DipTrace's autorouter is nicely integrated which makes the workflow efficient. Probably not as good as a million dollar commercial package, but who can afford that.

It's on my list to try KiCAD again at some point.

I also use KiCAD and FreeCAD.

As for autorouting, it might work for simple circuits, but what usually happens is that it will do 90% of the routing and a human brain has to do the other 10% after the auto-router has made a mess of things. That last 10% is where the work is anyway. Also, CERN is supporting KiCAD development, so it is steadily getting better.

FreeCAD takes a bit more work sometimes, but hey its free. You just have to learn to do it the FreeCAD way. MangoJelly on youtube has a whole series of tutorials.

Spajo

 

[Spajo]

Welcome to the thread and to the forum! I have been doing some other projects with the Pico W but have not gone further with this ELS. I've mostly been using MicroPython on my Pico projects thus far but for maximum performance one of the other toolsets may be helpful. In the past I've done Arduino projects including Arduino on Teensy so I might use that toolset, but there are some other choices now that I haven't looked at like Platform I/O. I generally prefer lightweight tools, but some of these setups are pretty large and thus bring a learning curve. It would be great to see some progress on a Pico solution. There has been major progress on a Teensy solution in another thread here and that's worth looking at. One challenge on the Pico is reading the encoder. Finding or writing some code to utilize the Pico state machines might be perfect for that.