Chris Lynas (@fastness@mastodon.social)

1y

New plotter design is nearly done. This will be an H belt design with the parts running on 2020 & 2040 V slot extrusion

I've completed all of the design (in #openSCAD), but I still have more parts to print and testing to do before I'll share the design; it will be on #printables at some point. It should do A3 and it might scale up to A2, but I'm a little concerned about stiffness and racking in the cross arm

#penplotter #3dprinting

A plotter made with silver & black anodised aluminium extrusions. The fittings that join the aluminium parts are bright orange, all is held together with steel socket cap screws. The moving parts are supported with small black plastic V wheels. The plotter is incomplete, with no belts as these will be fitted later. The whole thing sits on a bright red Christmas tablecloth, in the background a red laptop is open.

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A full overview of a plotter made with silver & black anodised aluminium extrusions. The fittings that join the aluminium parts are bright orange, all is held together with steel socket cap screws. The moving parts are supported with small black plastic V wheels. The plotter is incomplete, with no belts (these will be fitted later). The whole thing sits on a bright red Christmas tablecloth, some tools are visible on the table.

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1y

The new #OpenSCAD designed #penPlotter is working, the first plot is done!

Once I worked out the orientation (and I only crashed into the edges of travel once) it was easy to configure. It's not complete because I haven't sorted cable management, most seriously I don't have a servo cable guide yet but that will come

Going to try an A3 drawing next :)

#3dprinting

A table covered in a red Christmas tablecloth. Sitting on it is a white melamine shelf with scribbles all over it (remnants of testing pen plotters of the past). The plotter mechanism is screwed to the shelf, it is made from orange 3d printed plastic and black/silver aluminium extrusion. Overall it is shaped like a capital H letter, on the cross bar of the H a piece of A4 paper sits with a swirly drawing on it, the first plot from this new machine.

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1y

First A3 plot (random gravity time history thing) is done with the final software setup but careful manual steering of the servo cable for now

An orange, black and silver pen plotter sits on a red tablecloth. The first A3 plot that it has done is still fixed to the white base of the plotter with black tape. The plot is swirly interlinked lines twisting around reach other and spreading over the middle of the page

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1y

New #OpenSCAD designed #penPlotter is pretty much finalised now. I have all of the cable management and a new version of my old roller-based pen lift implemented in the design and the #3dprinted parts are updated to a status I'm happy with

I need to work on documentation for assembly though, the are some parts that are a little tricky - I remember FreeCAD working with OpenSCAD so I might use that to make some diagrams if I can remember how

The last test plot was this Bristol Beaufighter

The orange plastic parts of a plotter are shown next to a piece of white A4 paper. The paper has a spiral design which shows a Bristol Beaufighter, a twin engine WW2 aircraft

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New version of my old roller bearing pen lift that uses a 20 by 20 aluminium t-slot extrusion (I didn't know that there were different types last time I made a plotter so I bought the wrong type)

All plastic parts are bright orange, the previous ones were translucent.

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A pen plotter made of black/silver anodised aluminium v slot extrusions and orange 3d printed parts sitting on a yellow tablecloth patterned with flowers and seed heads (we finally put the Christmas one away). All cables are neatly wrapped and stowed behind orange plastic fittings screwed to the white(ish) melamine back board which is covered in previous plotter scribbles.

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