Saturday, August 10, 2019

Cardboard T-Bot, A Pen Plotter with Small Footprints


Hi people! So before I make a 3D printer, I want to make a plotter first, a pen plotter. This machine works with the same principle as a 3D printer, that the printer head will move in 3D space, but the printer head doesn't need to move a lot on the y axis (vertically). As long as the printer head isn't touching the paper anymore, then it's good.

So you don't actually need a third motor to move the printer head vertically, you can just use an inductor to form a magnetic field that can pull up the pen a little bit.

Before I made the real deal, I wanted to prototype using cardboards. You know what, the first attempt I made was a failure, because I wanted to make the plotter to be in the delta system, but the pen was wobbling so much. It was just impossible. 😂

Then, my second attempt, I made this plotter using belts and pulleys to move the pen and in Cartesian system. Sadly, it failed too, the pulleys weren't strong enough to hold the belts in place so they bent.

On my third attempt, I used gears instead of pulleys, and using polar coordinate system. Honestly, it wasn't so bad! But I can't seem to calibrate the rotation for the base correctly!

So I decided, that was it! I need more research. 😱

Now, after some researching, I found this core xy 3D printer. This printer is very interesting to me, because the movement isn't one axis placed on top of another, but the motor will move the printer head diagonally. So the motors needs to work together if you only want to move it in one axis. And there's actually a few variants to this, which is the H Bot, the T Bot, and the Mid T Bot, which is a very cool plotter. You can find more information about this here. So basically the Mid T Bot is a T Bot, but the motor is moved to the middle.

I really want to make that Mid T Bot, but my stepper motor wasn't very strong. I'm afraid if I move the motor to the moving parts, it'll increase the load on the motor. It's easier to put the motor on the side anyway, so yeah!

Oh and by the way, my first attempt was using an Arduino. But then I think I want it to have a faster process from designing the vectors to actually printing it. So I switched to Raspberry Pi! Which fortunately I owned from operating system in embedded system class I take a few semester ago.

This Raspberry Pi simply put is just a small computer, but with GPIO pin on it! How convenient right? I can write the programs in python and directly control the motor from there...

Anyway, I think that's it for now. Will talk to you later!

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