I see a man of culture as well, cheers for the contribution! This community is like 99% made for the Handy, which kinda sucks tbh… so seeing more people willing to create stuff for fuck machines makes me happy!
Though… i can’t help but notice that it’s all vastly more complex for kinda diminishing returns. A purely rotary drive machine like the Hismith and others in the price range will never be able to control depth to the speed and precision of servo drives or linear motors. While I appreciate the hard work and effort you went through to create this, I don’t really know how many people will have both the hardware and patience required to make this work properly.
Especially when running at higher speeds, say 3-4 hertz rotations on the machine, you will most likely need at least 60fps of image processing to get smooth position tracking results. And there’s quite a bit of extra stuff you need to procure to get it to work well as you described.
I would offer a counter-argument in the form of my own extension for OFS (which i will be also turning into a python app at some point).
It effectively does all that processing beforehand by analyzing the whole script. And it lets you modify it quickly afterwards as it is an OFS extension. Which makes it a lot safer because you will know what to expect when you eventually run it on the machine. And it requires zero additional hardware, and works with all other rotary machines. I made a nice GUI for it that allows you to make separate profiles for your machines, all it needs is a few initial measurements of the device in operation to get a pretty good linear approximation of its power-to-timing curve.
I don’t mean this in a competitive way or anything like that, i just feel the need to give people more choices in this space. Ultimately the goal is to automate as much of this work as possible so that we can spend more time fucking our brains out in sync with videos 