Thank you to everybody who bought kits and vitamin packs from me – the last few of you will have your machines heading out to you during next week and will probably get yours in the new year.
But that’s them all gone! It’s kind of fun running a little factory, but those of you who are still waiting will agree that I haven’t managed it terrifically well, and my wife deserves to get her living room back, so I will not be offering kits again in the foreseeable future.
That said, I’ve got 20 machines worth of cord and sprockets leftover, so if anybody wants those bits I can still sell you some of them.
Just when I thought I had found the best thing ever….. haha…. I do have a question then, with the new Arduino Uno and you no longer selling kits is there any good place for a novice to begin attempting my own polargraph. I just recently began a substantial amount of coding/robotics education at the U and would love to take on one of my own (and to fulfill some of my artsy endeavors as well).
Thanks!
Hey Reggie, don’t despair! This page (http://www.instructables.com/id/Polargraph-Drawing-Machine/step2/Parts/) of the instructable has a bill of materials, and the names of the places where I got mine. If you’re looking for sprockets and cords, I can give you 2x sprockets and 4m cord for £10 + postage. Not quite sure how much that’d be (depends where you are), but between £2 and £6.
Of course you can 3d print your parts (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12557) or use this schema (http://mambohead.com/category/drawbot/) which is pretty fly.
You don’t need many fancy bits though to be honest, my first one was just sewing bobbins hot-glued to motors, with a bulldog clip and a clear CD blu-tacked together to make a gondola. It’s so simple that there’s not much to not work, if you see what I mean! Leave a message on the forum if you want to investigate. Cheers!
Okay thanks. My main concern is with the actual coding itself. This is my first venture into the Arduino world so I wasn’t too sure on how that would fly with the code itself.
You’re probably pretty safe – any arduino compatible that has an ATMEGA328 chip (which is all of the new ones – old ones have ATMEGA168 chips) will load and run this code fine – they all work the same way and have the same pinouts. The motorshield will work with any full-size Arduino-compatible. It will also work with the Arduino MEGA, but only with some extra wiring.
My reason for using the seeeduinos for the kits was that they were cheap, and good quality. Of course I forgot that they have an unusual power input socket, so I had to spend money on getting a special connector to let them be plugged in anyway, but it’s the thought that counts, right? 🙂