Hanging wall plotter

I’m posting another project in my “dreaming” category – Bookmarked things that I’d like to have a go at in future. The hanging wall plotter looks amazing and was featured on the Raspberry Pi blog a while back.

The simplicity of this project is obvious – just two stepper motors and a pen-lift servo. It eliminates the hassle of x-y axis mechanisms and sliders, instead using two thin strings or something like fishing line.

Here, the complexity is hidden within the software. Plenty of trigonometry and Pythagoras at work.

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Lego compatible add-on pieces

Just a quick post today, but something seems to be happening in the Plastic Construction brick and Raspberry Pi world!

Within a space of two days, I received information about these two:

• Micrometal gear motor to Lego axle Adaptor which allows geared 6v motors to connect to Lego axles and wheels. I can see that this is going to result in a lot more Lego being automated by Raspberry Pi computers.
• The PiBlox case for the Raspberry Pi is the second surprise. This is, apparently, a Lego compatible Raspberry Pi case. It features slots in all of the right places. including space for a camera mount.

I can see that I’m going to have to get some! It would be interesting to see if a battery pack, motor driver and servo buffer could be fitted into a second PiBlox case allowing for an all-in-one design.

MeArm – Looks interesting…

I’ve just spotted the MeArm Robot Arm while browsing the interwebs. Looks interesting. A few servo motors and a driver board in addition to the various parts. The whole thing is open-source so it could be worth grabbing the files and trying out. I might need some more powerful servos than the cheaper plastic-geared ones that I’ve been buying.

MeArm is on Thingiverse and can be bought at 4tronix

Vertical Plotter

This looks like another rather interesting programming challenge. A PiFace could drive a couple of stepper motors quite easily. It would then be (hopefully) a straightforward job to convert X-Y Cartesian Coordinates into stepper motor positions.

Here’s the link:
http://www.open-electronics.org/a-low-fi-arduino-powered-vertical-plotter/

Miniature Servo-controlled plotter

Amazing what you find when trawling the internet…

This little plotter, built from 6 3d-printed parts, looks like an interesting challenge. I built a stepper-motor controlled plotter years ago and even wrote a simple CAD package in BBC-Basic, but this is a great approach. I’m imagining this combined with ServoBlaster and some simple Python programming. The main  website is at: Miniature Servo-controlled plotter