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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Pen-plotting!


We were invited to show our 1/3 completed 3D printer for some Waterloo event, so in a rush we jerry-rigged it to instead become a pen plotter. Unfortunately the printer is still not capable of squirting hot plastic yet (and probably at least not for a few months until we pass our school terms) but it moves and draws!

You can see on the left a picture of the jerry-rigged setup with the electronics strapped to the bottom of the machine and a UW eng sign written out. The drawing is hard-coded (we only had about a day to get the machine working) so its a little limited in capability, but at least we know it works! The right piece of paper shows our initial test pattern that we had the machine draw to see how straight the lines were (they looked pretty straight).


Watch below to see it in action! It's rather loud so that's something we'll have to address in the future, as well as the fact that the cantilevered z platform isn't as level as we'd like it to be.