Draw bot thoughts

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

Hi all!

I'm planing to build a drawing bot to make line drawings on paper using a pen. And I need some feedback.

The rig would be a X Y system driven by a stepper motor each. The pen can be lifted from the paper with a servo (or another motor?).

I am hoping to use ladyada.net motor shield which seems nice and easy. So far everything seems quite ok. The difficult part is the software part.

The best would be to have the motors run from g-code ( G-code - Wikipedia ). This I think would be best since g-code is easy to generate with several open source programs and seems to be somewhat of a standard.

Now how to get from the g-code to the movement of the motors and servo? The people over at the reprap.org project have made a arduino firmware that can read g-code and execute it on the reprap hardware. This seems wherry promising to me. But I'm wondering...

Would it be difficult to recode the reprap code to use the ladyada motor shield? Or should I use the reprap hardware? Would not that be a bit overkill for my relatively simple drawing bot?

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome! :slight_smile:

2

U know it might be better to build it from scratch. I am not sure how complicated this would be but I might be willing to help you do it. I am building a 3d printer so i could use the code too.

3

I don't know. I doubt my coding skills is good enough to manage a project like this from scratch. One thing is hacking something together out of something that nearly works, but doing it from scratch is difficult.

4

I'm interested in this too. (I think it would be fun to build a robot that solved a Sudoku puzzle and WROTE the solution down. :)).

5

After looking around it looks like the best way is to use electronics from the http://www.reprap.org/ project. They have the hardware I need and a early g-code understanding firmware for the arduino.

I'm running a thread at their forums for they who are interested. :slight_smile: