Comments on: What’s a polargraph?

By: PolargraphSD Case - OpenSCAD and Parametric - 3D Searcher

PolargraphSD Case - OpenSCAD and Parametric - 3D Searcher — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 16:14:46 +0000

[…] got a PolargraphSD setup from Sandy Noble ( http://www.polargraph.co.uk/whats-a-polargraph/ ) but I didn’t have a nifty case for it. I couldn’t fit my boards into the case Sandy […]

By: 3D Printed Polar Drawbot Can Make You a Modern Day Michelangelo | 3D Printing Thailand

Wed, 06 May 2015 06:09:53 +0000

[…] case you’re not familiar with the concept, a Polar Drawbot is a polargraph mural drawing robot intended to teach students about programming, physics, trigonometry, and […]

By: 3D Printed Polar Drawbot Can Make You a Modern Day Michelangelo - 3DPrint.com

3D Printed Polar Drawbot Can Make You a Modern Day Michelangelo - 3DPrint.com — Tue, 05 May 2015 19:03:14 +0000

[…] case you’re not familiar with the concept, a Polar Drawbot is a polargraph mural drawing robot intended to teach students about programming, physics, trigonometry, and […]

By: sandy

sandy — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 19:39:13 +0000

Thanks! The code uses the Accelstepper library to drive the motors, and that’s nice because accelstepper can talk to the adafruit shield (using the AFMotor library), or pretty much any other driver. So any driver that takes step and direction pulses will work ok. It’s all in the motor declaration.

If you have a MEGA, then it’ll be easier because the polargraph_server_polarshield already uses step+direction directly with the drivers on the polarshield, and the Easydrivers interface in exactly the same way as those.

If you want to adapt the standard polargraph_server_a1 to run on the uno, then you’ll need to change the motor declarations so they don’t use the AFMotor any more. Give it a shot, and if you have any problems, drop me a line, or post a message on the forum!

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 18:43:24 +0000

This is a great project! Is there any way i could get one of these running with easydrivers https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10267 instead of the Adafruit shield?

By: MAKE | Seb Lee-Delisle: Playing With Code

MAKE | Seb Lee-Delisle: Playing With Code — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:34:10 +0000

[…] instructions for the plotter, Seb adapted the code from another homebrew plotter project called Polargraph. And he worked with engineer Paul Strotten to build a custom plotter frame and servo drives at the […]

By: sandy

sandy — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:04:56 +0000

The polarshield is based (originally) on a RAMPS board, so there’d be only very trivial changes required to use RAMPS to drive a polargraph machine. Change a couple of pin assignments. You wouldn’t get the LCD easily, but the SD card would work.

Pen up/down should be easy enough too if you can find a PWM-capable pin that is spare on RAMPS. You _could_ implement a lift using a stepper rather than the servo, wouldn’t be difficult at all (code wise) but would require four wires and a heavier motor attached to the gondola. It isn’t something I’m interested in chasing myself.

I’m getting tired of waiting for the i3 to mainstream, I’m debating about whether I can justify a mendel90 to replace my little huxley…

By: Ji?í Pech

Ji?í Pech — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 11:19:25 +0000

Mega+A4988 sounds good to me, because with that I can build Polargraph from almost exactly the same hardware as Prusa Reprap i3 (which uses Mega 2560 and 4x A4988).

I can also use NEMA17 motors, print the rest and basically have two machines for the price of one. That’s what I call the open hardware domination! 🙂

Anyway, what about Pen up / Pen down? Would you like to implement it using another motor (servo)?

By: sandy

sandy — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 19:03:09 +0000

The motorshield categorically cannot work with a raspberry pi, but this wonderful project (http://jonathanjamieson.com/projects/electronics/drawing-machine/) has the heavyweight processing done on a rasppi, and that drives a simplified arduino driver circuit – that’s the best way to do it that I’ve seen.

By: g3k

g3k — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:59:43 +0000

Has anyone attempted using a rapberry pi rather than an arduino? Would the motorshield still work and would powering the motors be an issue?