Pen Plotter
This project has been clinking around in my head for several years. My first iteration of the design was done in highschool. The most recent I’m still messing around with. At its core, the Pen Plotter is just a controlled way to put value onto the page. There are a few different manners that this can be accompilished. The first way that I chose to solve this problem was with what I called the Polar Plotter.
Polar Plotter
The polar plotter started after a project that I was not able to figure out the scope of in highschool. The project was actually the first time that I ever used GitHub, there is a link here.
The project was to make physical gearing that would draw and trace out some vecotorized path, using the Fourier series. I had learned about that as a possiblity while being a part of Berkelely splash in highschool.
The polar plotter I sadly do not have any more record of. However I worked by having a central stepper motor, and a scissoring arm. Such that angle \(\theta\) and radius \(r\) of could be used. The majority of the code was mapping between the two spaces. It took several hundred lines of Arduino C++, to in essence just do this:
\[P = \{(x_1, y_1), (x_2, y_2), ..., (x_n, y_n)\}\] \[P_{polar} = \left\{ \begin{pmatrix} r_i \\ \theta_i \end{pmatrix} \middle| \begin{pmatrix} r_i \\ \theta_i \end{pmatrix} = \begin{pmatrix} \sqrt{x_i^2 + y_i^2} \\ \arctan2(y_i, x_i) \end{pmatrix}, (x_i, y_i) \in P \right\}\]But it was my first “real” programming project. And I shall forever remember it fondly for that reason.
The most recent iteration of this idea of a pen plotter was started in the Summer of 2023. I was working in a hardware store and had access to a lot of different materials at quite a good discount, so I decided to give the plotter another go.
Dual Gantry Plotter
This is a classic type of plotter design, but it was my first time making one of this type, and as such it was quite enjoyable. I first modeled it in CAD, and worked out some of the basic functionality in simulation.
It actually is still sitting on my desk as I do not have a printer, and therefore use it with quite regularity.
The first time that I ever got it working is shown below: 