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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

This is a fantastic hack. Does anyone know what that weird box in his rack is? (The one he packaged back up again at the end). It looks like it's something off-the-shelf to avoid writing code to turn the objects into GCode, but I guess this could have done more easily with a blender-to-gcode converter.

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You mean the DragonFrame controller box?

https://www.dragonframe.com/product/dmc-16/

It is bit weird how there seems to be this Arduino motion control stuff, and then also this dragonframe motion control and they are somehow integrated together. It seems to work fine for him, no doubt about that, but I feel like more integrated approach would be logical next step.

As I understood it, the Dragonframe controls the camera and the Arduino box controls the rig that moves the LED. (He describes this at around 8:08).

Yep, it's this: https://www.dragonframe.com/product/dmc-16/

It's what controls all the steppers and some of the lights it looks like.

Oh that's interesting, thanks. I'm not familiar with DragonFrame the software, but I imagine it's something that does 3D motion control for animators? I find it interesting that there doesn't exist (or that the author didn't use) an open source alternative for this box.

Hey, I made this! There are Arduino solutions for motion control with dragonframe, but I opted to invest in the DMC16 because it can handle in/out triggers (which I tapped into with the custom control box), it has DMX out lighting control, and it does motion control signals (faster than Arduino can), all in one nice package that I can rack together with the rest of the gear. Might be a little overkill and I'm sure a custom solution could work, but I'm more interested in results than process, so I tend to take the prebuilt approaches when possible.

That makes sense, thanks! Fantastic job, I love these sorts of projects.

Hey, I made this! There are Arduino solutions for motion control with Dragonframe, but I opted to invest in a used DMC16 because it can handle in/out triggers (which I tapped into with my custom control box), it has DMX out for lighting control, and it does motion control signals faster than Arduino can, and it's all in a nice package that I can rack together with the rest of the gear. It might be a little overkill and I'm sure a custom solution could work, but I'm usually more interested in results than process, so I tend to take prebuilt approaches when practical.

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