Tag Archives: polargraph

DrawBot – The Assembly, Part IV

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Here’s what I was able to do last night:

  • As I’ve mentioned, I know very very little about Arduinos or how to hook them up.  Although the Adafruit stepper motor page gives some guidance as to how to hook up the Stepper motor – 200 steps/rev, 12V 350mA, “Red, Yellow, skip ground, Green, Brown,” I have no idea which side or starting from which end of the terminal block this is supposed to go.  Admittedly, I have a 50/50 chance of wiring it up properly.
  • I tried hooking up two old steppers I had scrapped from some old electronics – but all I got for my troubles was a small popping noise and the smell of electronics.  There was no blue smoke, no apparently burned parts, and I was able to program the Arduino Uno to blink and then run a servo through the Motor Shield.
  • I designed and printed a spool for holding the monofilament line and which will fit snugly on the stepper motor shaft.  I got a little sidetracked playing with Skeinforge settings, but the spools turned out really well.
  • I printed a gondola for holding the pen, designed for the Polargraph by John Abella
  • I designed and printed a holder for the Arduino with the Motor Shield on it – but it was slightly too narrow for some reason.  I’ll have to redesign, reprint.
  • I’ll have to design and print a new motor block as well as a filament line guide.  I have some cool ideas for the latter.
  • I tried to use the Polargraph controller, but I wasn’t able to get it to do much.  I”ll give it another whirl tonight.
  • I know I’ll also have to change some of the Polargraph Arduino code to accommodate the motor and spool combination I’m using.
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DrawBot – The Assembly, Part III

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I debated with myself over how best to lay out my build log for this DrawBot. 1  Is it better to post the build process as I’m working on it, so that it would span numerous posts, or is it better to try to keep posting all the major steps into one post so that it is easy to follow?  At the cost of appearing repeatedly repetitious over and over again, I think if I were following along at home I’d want to read either one long post that covers everything or a small series of posts that cover the few major steps.  It’s easier at this stage to put all the information into one long post, revising it as I go along and pruning the ubiquitous2 nonsense out as I go.

Here’s what I’m adding in this iteration:3

  1. A section about optional hacks to the Adafruit Motor Shield
  2. More detail about the various libraries and the sketch necessary to upload the Polargraph source code
  3. Instructions for uploading the Polargraph source code
  4. Slightly better organization of my build outline

Continue reading →

  1. FYI, I was explaining this DrawBot to a friend at a party yesterday.  He suggested I create a wipe board robot instead, similar to the Lady Ada and Matt Metts robots, and call it the BotWiper. [↩]
  2. Don’t you just love that word? [↩]
  3. Since this information is 95% stuff you would have seen from the prior Assembly post, I’ll put it after a little “More” tag. [↩]

DrawBot – Giant Unicorn?

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As you may know, I’ve got a MakerBot Cupcake named “Bender” and a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic named “Flexo“.  There’s really no doubt in my mind I’ll be springing for a Replicator with dual extrusion. 1  Thankfully, I think there’s a way for me to make use of each of my robots, in its own special way.  I figure I can keep the Cupcake rocking a Unicorn Pen Plotter, use my Automated Build Platform in my Thing-O-Matic for mass production of smaller parts, and put a Replicator to work printing new, wacky, and/or large designs.

But, why am I talking about giant unicorns?!  Sandy Noble, the creator of the Polargraph,2 just posted about how he has created a vector graphics importer for the Polargraph software.  This is some pretty amazing stuff.  The MakerBot Unicorn has several software toolpaths that take vector graphics to GCode for printing through ReplicatorG.  The end result is that a Polargraph rocking a vector graphic importer should be able to draw arbitrary shapes, without the need to draw scribbly bits.

I think it would be particularly awesome to have a DrawBot draw a frame/border and then fill it with a scribbly/pixelated drawing.  Or, perhaps, draw the outline of an object and then fill it in with scribbly/pixelated shadings.

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  1. Will my extravagance know no bounds?! [↩]
  2. Which is probably the best documented DrawBot on the internet [↩]

DrawBot – The Hacks

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Sandy Noble's modifications to Adafruit's Motor Shield

Sandy Noble's modifications to Adafruit's Motor Shield

Chatting with Sandy Noble over at the Polargraph website has been extremely helpful. 1  It looks like he’s added three changes to the Adafruit Motor Shield:

  • Heatsink added23
  • Breakout boards to connect the terminals to the clips for the motor leads.  However, it looks like there’s a small little component of a circular purple variety also on that board.
  • Extra pins for hooking up a cooling fan.  Sandy says he doesn’t use them any more, but it really wouldn’t be a bad idea given that it would take hours for even a simple print.
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  1. The photo is from Sandy Noble’s photo stream.  It says All Rights Reserved and I will happily take it down if he asks and says this is not a fair use.  Given that all of his stuff has been very open source, I’m guessing this was just a default setting. [↩]
  2. To the H-Bridges? [↩]
  3. Also…  Where does one get a heatsink?  How do you attach it? [↩]

DrawBot – What would you draw?

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If you’re just tuning in, I’m going to be building a DrawBot.  Or, in the alternative, I intend to fail as spectacularly as I can.

However, it occurs to me that I need not be constrained by just my ideas of what a drawing robot should draw.  Admittedly, several of my anticipated print jobs are going to take a while since my daughter already has a stack of drawings she wants a drawing robot to replicate.  Here are the things I’m thinking about drawing:

So, if you had a drawing robot that could create sketches of arbitrary size, what would you draw?

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  1. I’m kidding [↩]
  2. The reason I’m kidding is that a Polargraph tends to create a sketchy sort of design – so trying to replicate a Pollock painting would be an exercise in abstracting abstractness. [↩]