天気の子 Weathering with You

I watched this anime quite some time ago. On its opening day in Japan, in fact. More than a month back. It is the latest work by director Shinkai Makoto, who brought us Your Name.

And like his previous great hit, this new work took the box office by storm. The movie also continues to feature breathtaking and highly realistic scenes, painstakingly detailing places in various parts of Tokyo.

The movie continues on the themes of searching and self-discovery as well as love, but it also portrays a more realistic view of Tokyo, with scenes featuring night-time entertainment, love hotels, and even yakuza. While most mainstream animation works avoid these portrayal, it seems that Shinkai Makoto does not shy away from fully portraying reality in his works.

So which is the better love story? Maybe, Garden of Words.

I digress.

All his works are touching, and you can see his signature. The realistic portrayal of places, so much so that fans visiting those places portrayed in his movies have become a mini-industry. The common theme of love. Of searching for something. Of trying to find one's calling. Of hope.

I am looking forward to the next great work. 😉

Stress testing the MRR ESPA

To make sure the MRR ESPA works stably, I have been using it to print some stuff. Some of them were fan covers (40mm and 80mm) and bases for mounting the MRR ESPA board and the more advanced MRR ESPE. But some were more for fun. Like these.

All of them were printed on my modified Ender-3, which has a clone Titan Aero direct drive and is controlled by the MRR ESPA. I haven't done much tweaking; it is still using an old profile meant for use with linear advance (which is not enabled on the MRR ESPA). With coasting and such, I should get better results, but my purpose now is not quality, but more to test stability. All in, the MRR ESPA has probably completed several hundred hours of printing.

Compiling TMCStepper for ESP32

I was trying to test TMC2130 support for the MRR ESPA and MRR ESPE using Marlin 2.0 bugsfix. However, I kept running into problems.

It started with the lack of SoftwareSerial.h.  Searching around, there is a EspSoftwareSerial library. But even using that didn't work for me. There were errors about override and such.

Then I came upon these issues in the TMCStepper repo.
ESP32 is no SoftwareSerial Compatible Platform
ESP32 compatibility

It seems the issue is that TMCStepper library has defined the ESP32 as capable of software serial. Which, technically, it is, but the available libraries to support software serial on the ESP32 somehow does not work well with the TMCStepper library. The workaround is to remove ESP32 from the list of platforms which are capable of software serial.

In TMCStepper.h, change:
#define SW_CAPABLE_PLATFORM defined(__AVR__) || defined(TARGET_LPC1768) || defined(ARDUINO_ARCH_ESP32) || defined(ARDUINO_ARCH_STM32F1)
to:
#define SW_CAPABLE_PLATFORM defined(__AVR__) || defined(TARGET_LPC1768) || defined(ARDUINO_ARCH_STM32F1)

Marlin 2.0 should then compile without errors.

Next step, flash the firmware onto the MRR ESPA/ESPE and check that the stepper motor actually moves.

Back to a familiar place for practice

It is always nice to be able to practise at a familiar place.

Same place, same people.