Blade for plotter drawing update#
Blade for plotter drawing software#

Trusted Performance: Max Paper Feed: 28'/720mm Max Cutting Width: 24.8'/630mm Cutting Thickness: 0.04'/1mm.The majority of the holes are 6mmГё for bolts to go through to hold up things like the mounts for the rails. The assembly of the base is very simple, the 6mm MDF boards go one on top of the other, the top one has a recess for the stepper cut out of it as well as a recess for the breadboard and Arduino. The stepper motor linked will fit in the recess that is cut out in the. These guides would cause a lot of friction but I know how strong the Y-Axis' stepper is and as such I wasn't worried. I decided also to place some guides down the side of the base which would ensure the bed could not rotate off course as it had been doing previously. I mounted a couple of L shaped brackets off the printer component by which I would later suspend the x-axis over the rest of the plotter.Д«ack at Uni I drew up a base and bed in AutoCAD to cut on the laser cutter so that I could make my whole setup more accurate. The belt would then run between the motor and idle and attached to the black plastic caddy will pull my pen along the x-axis. Originally there was a motor at one end of the bracket and an idle at the other with a belt in between, had the motor been a stepper motor l would have been able to leave these in place, however I instead removed both and after a fair bit of manipulation I mounted an idle gear at one end and a stepper at the other (these are the gears you see in the video). I took the bracket that the ink cartridges originally were fixed to and cut away pieces of the black plastic caddy you see in the video until i had a nice clean surface where I would later attach a pen. So I began by taking apart an old printer that had stopped working as I had seen a few examples of plotters that use running gear from obsolete or broken hardware and liked the idea of using parts that would otherwise go to land fill. I would not suggest that people copy this design completely as it was only my second project of this nature as as such has its limitations, but it may serve as a valuable point of research for those interested. This instructable is intended as a resource for people who are thinking about building a similar CNC machine, or have already started and are looking for answers and troubleshooting problems. dwg for the laser cut base however please use the material with caution and check measurements yourself before cutting your precious materials.

With that brief introduction out of the way I will show you how I went about building the plotter, I will provide drawings like the. Inkscape will convert your drawings to G-Code which grbl will interpret and send instructions to the plotter.

Blade for plotter drawing software#

I use grbl with the Arduino to send G-Code to the printer and a really great way to create G-Code is with the totally free software Inkscape, which has a built-in feature, G-Code tools. Since all three axes are running a stepper motor the pen could be replaced with a router and become a CNC milling machine (in theory). The plotter is comprised of 3 stepper motors each powered by a V4.4 EasyDriver and runs off a 12V DC supply. Inspired by Wikihouse founder, Alastair Parvin, and his proposition that вЂњif designвЂ™s great project of the 20th century was the democratisation of consumptionвЂ¦ designвЂ™s great project in the 21st century is the democratisation of productionвЂќ I set about the task of building a machine that would be capable of printing my own customised open source Wikihouse from the commons at a 1:100 scale.ДЇor the real Wikihouse project you would use a CNC router and 18mm plywood, but due to time constraints I opted to build a smaller more manageable desktop pen plotter which would still plot accurate CAD drawings. I decided to build this as an accompanying piece of work for my 4th year architecture dissertation at the University of Edinburgh the topic of which is open source architecture and the challenges it poses for the architectural profession. Thank you for taking the time to check out my instructable for an Arduino based X-Y plotter.

Blade for plotter drawing update#

Update - Have added a step to cover adding a cutting tool.