A4988 Stepper Motor Driver

Helping out a friend with a new laser engraver led to me having to debug the circuit containing the A4988 Stepper motor driver.

Whilst doing that I used the following circuit and code on a Arduino UNO to test the various components.


The circuit use the following baseline from the Pololu website

Things to note:

It is important that VMOT be in the 8-35V range (I use 12V)

The Circuit used:

 

And the code:

Loading Gist: https://gist.github.com/madmouser1/dc271f3ed70175d9bd8c0b6b4edb50b7

	I copied the gems to my box and installed them with the below command.. (it did take a while to install). Thus, please give it sometime before you think it might hang for ever.
	mohnish@mohnish-laptop:~/xxxx/latest/prj_name/vendor/cache$ gem install ruby-debug19-0.11.6.gem -l
	Building native extensions. This could take a while...
	Building native extensions. This could take a while...
	Successfully installed linecache19-0.5.12
	Successfully installed ruby-debug-base19-0.11.25
	Successfully installed ruby-debug19-0.11.6
	3 gems installed
	Installing ri documentation for linecache19-0.5.12...
	Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug-base19-0.11.25...
	Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug19-0.11.6...
	Installing RDoc documentation for linecache19-0.5.12...
	Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug-base19-0.11.25...
	Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug19-0.11.6...

view raw Installing linecache19 - rvm ruby 1.9.3 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Ubuntu - merge Video files

The following applications can be used to concatenate video files.

Some ways to determine details of the media files :

ffprobe file.mp4

ffmpeg -i file.mp4

Extracting AC3 audio with FFMpeg

ffmpeg -i video.avi -acodec copy audio.ac3

or if there are multiple audio streams use the map to select the correct stream to extract

ffmpeg -i my_input_file.m4v -map 0:2 -c:a copy output_file.ac3 

MP4

sudo apt-get install gpac 

 MP4Box -add file1.mp4 -cat file2.mp4 NameofCombinedFile.mp4

Update:

And a way with ffmpeg (if all files are the same format):

ffmpeg -f concat -i <(for f in ./*.mp4; do echo "file '$PWD/$f'"; done) -c copy ../destination.mp4

Update2:

And to compress the mp4 afterwards for something like Youtube:

ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -codec:v libx264 -crf 21 -bf 2 -flags +cgop -pix_fmt yuv420p -codec:a aac -strict -2 -b:a 384k -r:a 48000 -movflags faststart target.mp4

Update 3: 

to add a audio channel to a video file:

MP4Box -new -add OriginalMovie.mp4 -add Track2.mp3#audio:delay=300 Output.mp4

MKV

sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix

mkvmerge [global options] {-o out} [options1] {file1} [[options2] {file2}] [@optionsfile] 

AVI

sudo apt-get install transcode transcode-utils

avimerge -i part1.avi part2.avi -o joinedfile.avi