Well, my newly designed motor mounts, while cool, just aren’t working.  If I were committed to using that long pine box, I could probably make a go of them.  I’ve tried several variations on this robot, and nothing has really worked so far.  Here’s what I’ve tried:

1. In a box, mounted to the wall
1. This just didn’t work.  The spot I found on the wall was in our robot room, behind my monstrous card catalog.  It was difficult to get to, the laptop I had it hooked up to wasn’t really talking to the robot, and I didn’t even get it fully hooked up in that location before I decided it just wasn’t going to work.
2. In a box, under an easel
1. In a fit of inspiration I realized that I had a painting easel, a rather nice one at that.  I took an old new canvas1 , put it on the easel, put the easel’s feet inside the long pine box, ran the monofilament line from the motor, through holes in the pine box, up behind the canvas, through an eyescrew on top of the canvas, and down over the front.  This was terrible.  It creaked, shuddered, and the pen sputtered around the front.
3. In a box, on an easel
1. Not ready to give up on Project Easel, I tried to put the pine box on top of the canvas and hold them together in the easel.  This really didn’t work.  Because of the location of the motors in the pine box, the canvas was either going to block the holes for the monofilament line or I’d have to run the line through the top of the box, which would have resulted in the same creaky, shuddering, sputtering problem of using the line through a hole in the box as if it were a pulley.  Either way, the entire assembly just wasn’t stable on the easel which did not want to hold it together.
4. Bolted to a chunk of wood
1. I actually have some spare plywood, but it’s been in the garage for a while and has a weathered look to it.  It also has a large 1.5 foot radius quarter circle cut out of it.  I figure if I’m going to keep this inside, I might as well spring for a new piece of wood.  A bit over $14 at the hardware store and I was in business.  Now that I’ve given up on my nifty motor mounts, I designed and printed a dead simple motor mount.  I could have accomplished much the same result by just drilling some holes in a piece of scrap wood. 2  I’ve also abandoned a gondola of my own design. 3
2. The final result is essentially as follows – a 2’x4’x0.5″ piece of plywood, wrapped in butcher paper, two steppers bolted to mounts and screwed to the left and right sides at the end of the plywood.  The steppers are wired to the stepper motor in the center, and the Arduino and stepper motor controller are in an ill-fitting plastic holder which is duct taped to the front top of the plywood.  The plywood is then propped up against our built-in on which my most useless laptop is sitting, ready to run the robot.

1. Old because I’ve had it for about 10 years; new because it’s still in the shrink wrap.  Now, to my credit, I have actually painted on my other canvases – this is just the last one and I completely forgot about it. [↩]
2. These will probably have been the very very last thing I’ll have ever printed with my black ABS. [↩]
3. While cool, it just did not work well at all – I made the pen holder so large it would only hold the largest sharpie made by man, it didn’t do a good job of holding the pen against the paper, and it held the weights rather awkwardly. [↩]