Just came across this brilliant drawing machine on Norwegian Creation’s blog.
What a handsome gondola! And the quality of the drawing is beautiful – would love to have a peep at their software. The enviable sharpness, I guess, is a product of the big brass weight that keeps the whole thing very tight. It uses a variable-width line – but doesn’t seem to have identifiable “pixels” as such, I wonder how it does it.
Very spiffy all around. It would be nice to have a friend who’s a machinist, so I could design a nice steampunkish brass polargraph rig and have him/her fab it for me.
I wonder how much that gondola weighs. I doubt my wee can-style steppers could dependably move it, especially without a counterweight.
I’ve never tried drawing without the big plastic disc on my gondola. Their gondola doesn’t have one, but also seems to move very slowly. A timelapse they posted shows a modest size drawing taking almost ten hours.
I intended to not bother with the stabiliser on the last round of kits because it looks silly and I was getting decent results without it, but then someone (John Abella I think) had issues with his 3d printed gondola that were solved by adding the stabiliser back in, so I figured it was a borderline thing and safer to use it than not. I think you’re right that reliability under speed is probably the thing that the stabiliser helps with. I think that the distance of the moves are also significant – with very small movements the stabiliser won’t have any stabilising effect anyway.
I’m not even entirely sure how it works. I’m sure hanging a great brass padlock off the bottom of the gondola would do a lot to keep things taut and perpendicular too, but like you say, we would need some beefier motors to do it.
I really like that halftone quality though, using a variable width wave. Totally going to try something like that.
On the other hand, you don’t have to machine brass for an interesting gondola. You can use polycaprolactone plastic (Shapelock, Instamorph, Polymorph, Friendly Plastice, etc) to make something that wouldn’t look out of place in “eXistenZ”.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Facebook-Wall-Robot/
Hi Sandy,
I’m thinking of getting adafruits microSD breakout to make my own standalone machine. Should i add some buttons like your new remote? and if so can you tell me the schematic for the buttons to the mega. Thanks
Matt
Hey Matt, the microSD breakout is pricey but very neat and dead easy to rig. I don’t think I’d recommend the buttons – it is a bit of a kludge and the code isn’t going to support that kind of interface in the future.
If you’re keen though, I can write it up, though the circuit is embarrassingly crude.
I’m planning on using these boards for the physical interface.
Those boards look really cool. I may wait too see what you’ve got up your sleeve for the new board. Thanks
I reckon it’s a chisel tip pen that is rotated for variable line width.
I don’t see any mechanism for doing that – the servo is for a lift. But it’s a very intriguing and elegant idea. Have you seen anything that uses that technique Matt? Could rig a servo to turn the pen.
I did something similar with my Eggbot; you can get strips of variable width to represent variations in brightness. I put more details at http://www.fastness.co.uk/111120_eggbotBitmap.html I included source code for processing that might be adaptable but the algorithm isn’t really complex
Thanks for the share Chris, looks good. I was most curious about the very low sampling area that must be being used to decide the wave amplitude on this one. I guess that’s limited by the pen width.
hi all, how is drawn this print!?
cannot understand!
thank yoy
giorgio