I’ve moved the latest updated version of this post to my website dedicated to “v-plotter” drawing robots. Check it out!
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As I’m gathering the parts and the courage to build my own Drawbot, I’m keeping track of the various resources I’m using. Since I’ll be documenting my success1 here, it would be nice to have the online resources I’m using organized in one place. To this end, and in furtherance of this goal, and without further ado, I bring you an ever growing list of resources.2
Verbosely yours,
MakerBlock
Update:
- 2013/04/01: Link to Vertical Plotter on Arduino.cc, DrawBug by Tinkerdays, Whiteboard plotter, and Giant Printer
- 2013/02/14: Link to Erik the WallPlotter.
- 2013/01/25: Link to Gontarcyyk.org
- 2012/08/27: Link to Stuart Childs’ DRBO Polargraph
- 2012/08/15: Link to Michael Cooks’ Polargraph build at Foobarsoft.com
- 2012/06/27: Link to Drawing Machine (Thanks LineKernel!)
- 2012/04/19: Link to Facebook Wall Robot
- 2012/04/16: Link to Norwegian Creations’ Drawing Machine
- 2012/04/10: Link to SmoothOctopus and Dan Royer’s Drawbot! (Thanks Dan!)
- 2012/03/26: Link to GarabatoBOT
- 2012/03/18: Link to Dealywhopper’s Mr. Scratchy
- 2012/02/16: Added links to John Cliff’s “Ugly Cousin” DrawBot
- 2012/02/12: Added link to Viktor
- 2012/01/30: Added Lanthan’s printable Krizlerbot Polargraph gondola
- 2012/01/27: Added more info about James Provost’s InternBot and several other DrawBots
- 2012/01/19: Updated to include link to Matthew Venn’s energy monitoring Polargraph
- 2012/01/09: Updated to include link to Matt Met’s Whiteboard drawbot! Thanks for the link Matt!
Links:
- Der Kritzler by Alex Weber
- Polargraph by Sandy Noble
- Printed Polargraph by John Abella
- John’s printed Polargraph Flickr set
- John designed a printable gondola and ball-chain-pulley on Thingiverse
- John used Kit Kraft for ball-chain, Adafruit for steppers and the motor shield3, with a Freeduino
- Printed Krizlerbot Polargraph gondola by Lanthan (on Thingiverse)
- Mambohead aka Darcy Whyte’s drawing robot Mr. Drew Darcy is incredibly prolific and has shared much of his work on his site
- “Ugly Cousin” DrawBot by John Cliff, picture 1, picture 2
- Dealywhopper’s Dr. Scratchy
- GarabatoBOT (DoodleBOT) on Thingiverse, YouTube, blog
- Hektor
- Thing-a-day, Day 19: Whiteboard Bot by Matt Mets
- An awesome comment from LadyAda with a photo of her own whiteboard bot!
- Viktor by Jürg Lehni
- Drawing machine by Harvey Moon (under Multimedia Works) also, here
- Drawbot by AS220 Labs
- Muralizer by Josh Myer
- Drawbot tutorial on Make Magazine by Shawn Wallace
- Make It Last Newsletter
- Blog posts about the contest5
- James Provost’s InternBot
- Bill Rasmussen’s 2e5.com plotter theory
- SADbot by Dustyn Roberts
- Tristan Perich Machine Drawing
- Matthew Venn’s polargraph energy monitoring
- Doug Kanter’s thoughts on drawing robot tech
- Mark Stephenson’s mention of drawing robot art at ArtEngine ModLab (mention of Mambohead’s drawbot)
- Sailindaze’s posts about his drawing robot, an update on said robot, and his trip to the Maker Faire Detroit
- FlickrHiveMind.net collection of photos tagged with “drawbot”
- Bill French’s drawing robot at FUBAR labs
- This RasterWeb Friday Night DrawBot is a rolling robot that draws logo-esque circles
- SmoothOctopus Flickr stream
- Dan Royer’s Drawbot on his blog Marginally Clever with his hard work and source code shared on Github!
- Norwegian Creations’ Drawing Machine
- Facebook Wall Robot on Instructibles
- Drawing Machine by LineKernel
- Polargraph build by Michael Cook at Foobarsoft
- Stuart Childs’ DRBO Polargraph
- Gontarczyk.org
- Matt Ball and Will (?) built Erik the Wall Plotter and shared their software on Github
- Vertical Plotter on Arduino.cc by Pietro Leoni
- DrawBug by Tinkerdays at Arduino.cc and Tinkerdays.com with pictures at Flickr
- Whiteboard Plotter (in Icelandic)
- Another Whiteboard Plotter by Spritetm
- Giant Printer by GeekPhysical with a YouTube video and some Flickr photos. Their blog indicates this project was created in 2006 using some code that’s about 10 years old as of 2011. Unfortunately, their code and designs are not open source.
- Printball by Benjamin Gaulon6
- Or, alternatively, EPIC failures [↩]
- Some of which were borrowed from Sandy Noble‘s site [↩]
- Instructions for Adafruit motor shield assembly [↩]
- Includes parts list! [↩]
- The Make Magazine contest ended 3/3/2011 [↩]
- The last one is just a graffiti/painter robot that paints on far off walls by shooting a paintball gun at the surface. It’s really quite awesome. [↩]
Hi! I have another for you.
http://github.com/I-make-robots/drawbot
Open source, runs gcode, Java GUI.
Hi,
Found your site after searching for wall drawing robots IOIO based (http://www.keerbot.com/ioio-micro-controller-plotter/ ) I am doing a similar project – but my configuration is different – I have the motors on the moving platform
See http://www.KeerBot.com.
I would like to make a Tinkerbell character in the play “Peter Pan” to perform on a full size stage. It would be an area perhaps 50ft wide x 20ft tall. I picture a design similar to the Drawbot, but with a battery powered ball of LED’s located where the pen would be. I imagine the character would need to travel up to 10 feet per second.
Because of the size and speed of my concept, I imagine there are number of considerations that I have not thought of yet. So, I would love to talk with someone who has done something at this scale. Can you recommend someone? All of the links I have tried so far on your list have been smaller ones, or large ones that move relatively slowly.
Thank You
@Joe Dunfee: What you’re describing is completely feasible. A large drawbot setup, holding a bright LED ball with a battery in it, could be driven all around a stage as large as you’ve described. I’m guessing you wouldn’t need the accuracy that would come from a slower smaller setup, so you could run it pretty fast. The only downside to using a setup like mine is that it would only be able to move in a single plane.
I know Dan Royer had built a double-drawbot which used four wires to control the movement of an object in three dimensional space. I don’t see he’s selling these any more, but he could probably put together a kit. He’s a really nice guy, so if you reach out to him I’m sure he’ll point you in the right direction.
That said, it would be AWESOME to use a quadcopter for this.
Thanks for the recommendation to contact Dan Royer, I will follow up on that after the Maker Fair in New York.
I hadn’t thought of a quad copter. But, though noise they make is not attractive for theater. What will really kill the idea, is the issue of having to perform near human beings. And while there are some copters that are kid-safe, I don’t think I can control it reliably enough without a system like what CMU uses for all their stuff. Getting a copter tangled in an actress’s hair would be a show-stopper.
Yes, the single plane of the ArtBot may be a limitation, but typically there are other things that compete for space in a theater anyway. Painted scenery that must be lowered down from above, don’t permit cords to cross from up to down stage (i.e. from the front of the stage to the back). Still, I may need something for Tinkerbell to lead the kids out the window. I may simply make a duplicate Tinkerbell that does that particular flight on a single thread that gets taken down after the flight.
My main concern is about the task of reeling-out something that doesn’t have a lot of weight on it. I imagine that any spool of cord will tend to loosen itself into a tangled mess if you exceed a certain speed. I have seen some artbots that don’t take the cord up on a spool, but rather the cord goes over a pulley to a weight. This both reduces the weight the stepper motor has to lift, and perhaps prevents the spool from tangling.
@Joe Dunfee: Yeah, the downside of using a double-drawbot is that you would need a LOT of wire hanging from all around the stage – and it would likely interfere with the actors and stage. My drawbot which was built on an Arduino Uno and Adafruit Motor Shield was significantly slower than the one I built using Sandy Noble’s Polargraph SD shield. If you want consistency and speed, I can’t recommend his parts highly enough. As for the weight issue – my PlotterBot isn’t very heavy at all. It’s a piece of printed plastic with a pen, a servo motor, and two AA batteries hot glued to it just for weight. I think as long as you have enough weight on the line to make sure it’s reasonably taut, you should be fine.