V-Plotter

Data

github accounts: @rusoaie category: IoT table no: 33

Inspiration

Back in the Renaissance a lot of guys drew naked ladies and fruit. We're geeks and can't draw even if our lives depended on it, so we thought we enable our computers to draw.

What it does

Our plotter can be mounted on any flat surface and can draw SVG files using a marker.

How we built it

We use two stepper motors in the top corners of the drawing surface. We suspend a central drawing head by using fishing nylon, forming a V shape.

The motors are controlled by a Raspberry Pi and we submit SVG files to be interpreted and drawn on the surface.

Challenges we ran into

There's not enough tape and hot glue in the world.
No, really, we need more tape.
Scaling the graphics was a challenge
Corelating motor steps with millimeters of movement.
Libraries did not match Raspberry PI versions (get your shit together, Raspberry Pi)
Wiring motors... too many wires...
The lack of a beer keg doesn't help us focus.
We need to engineer a mechanism that lifts the pen from the paper, between shapes of the same SVG.
Transforming XY coordinates to the "V-shape-thingy-coordinate-system" (too technical, sorry for that)
thinking...