Hubris, I haz it

Mr. Noble is not the only one prone to hubris.1 After taking into account every post on ideal drawing robot pen holder criteria, I found one more post that I should have read first.  Dan Royer of MarginallyClever.com suggests2 as good pen holder should:

1. A single cord convergence point.  “Have the two strings meet at a single point, or as close as possible.  The moment they separate the math gets really ugly.”
2. Deal with friction.  “Friction causes the pen to drag and lean.  If I tell the robot to draw a square corner and it comes out rounded then I know my pen is dragging because it never reached the corner.  The pen has to stay at a right angle to the drawing surface.  So far I’ve found that having at least three points of contact is enough to eliminate the problem.  That’s why I tape my business card to an eye bolt on the bottom of the ring – the bottom edge of the card forms a large contact area with very little friction.”
3. Be well balanced.  “If the pen is balanced wrong it may point up or down.  If it points up then it might go dry.  If it points down then it might have extra friction when moving downwards, causing the pen to skip and create a dotted line.”
4. Have an easy way to switch pens.  “Not only should it be easy to replace a pen but every pen should “lock” into the pen holder at the same distance and angle from the drawing surface.  In order to simplify this problem I only use one kind of pen that comes in many colors.”
5. Works on a slanted surface.  “Works on both vertical and slanted surfaces up to a maximum of 10 degrees.”

My own prior post on ideal characteristics in a pen holder took into account Dan’s number 1, 3, 4 and considered 5.  What I failed to consider was how friction can cause the pen to skip or stutter when the pen is mounted at an angle and the pen travels upwards.

Although I started diving into this consideration, but I’m putting all that over-pontification into its own post.  This post is really about (a) Dan considered a very important factor in pen holder construction which I neglected and (b) how awesome open source is.  My own pen holder would be a terribly complicated mess doomed to multiple revisions had I not had the benefit of being able to review a veritable legion of pen holders used by many many other people in their many many different kinds of vertical drawing robots.

So – Yay Dan!  Huzzah open source!

The next post will be about whether this consideration would cause me to change my existing pen holder design.

1. Photo courtesy of Markus Krispler [↩]
2. I’m keeping all of Dan’s words, but reformatting them [↩]