My mother has got into the scrap booking craze. One of the really cool things she has for cutting out paper is a "Making Memories Slice" Its a little micro controller ran paper cutter that you can pop SD cards in and cut designs out of paper. It was at Big Lots.

Well it stopped working for her. The solenoid that raises and lowers its razor stopped working. She called the manufacture up to see if its something that can be fixed. They told her that model has a "wiring fault" and offered her a discount. Which would be fine but she doesn't have the spare cash yet.

I took a crack at it. First thing that caught my eye when she bought it was that the razor didn't run on a X, Y system (up down left right). It runs on a polar style system, (rotation around the center point, distance from the center.

I thought when they said wiring fault they meant it was one of the plastic style ribbons had broken. When I took it apart I found out that wasn't the case they ran the four wires for one of the stepper motors and the two wires for the razor solenoid with out taking in account the units rotation.

All six wires were twisted into a rope pulling the connector for the solenoid out of the main circuit board. By faulty wiring they mean their software has a slight problem keeping the wires straight untangled. After unwinding the wires I plugged them back in and got everything back into position every thing worked fine. I just have to unwind the wires every month or so.

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Useful specs for the unit.

2 bi polar stepper motors 12 v
1 octal rotatory switch.
1 latching solenoid 12 v
TI 430 based micro controller
graphical lcd with 6 buttons
sd card slot.
12 volt 600 ma nimh batter back (2/3 AA X 10)
12 volt power supply

File format has yet to be documented.

Edit:
I am trying to think of how to calculate a line in that polar format. I am thinking draw the line on an X,Y grid use the center of the circle of the as the reference. You would just need to calculate the right triangle formed from the center and the point on the line you need to get to. Your hypotenuse would be your distance the one angle of the triangle would be your rotation. You would just need to calculate a lot of points along that line.

I am not sure though.