I took the bracket that the ink cartridges originally were fixed to and cut away pieces of the black plastic caddy you see in the video until i had a nice clean surface where I would later attach a pen. So I began by taking apart an old printer that had stopped working as I had seen a few examples of plotters that use running gear from obsolete or broken hardware and liked the idea of using parts that would otherwise go to land fill. I would not suggest that people copy this design completely as it was only my second project of this nature as as such has its limitations, but it may serve as a valuable point of research for those interested. This instructable is intended as a resource for people who are thinking about building a similar CNC machine, or have already started and are looking for answers and troubleshooting problems. dwg for the laser cut base however please use the material with caution and check measurements yourself before cutting your precious materials. With that brief introduction out of the way I will show you how I went about building the plotter, I will provide drawings like the. Inkscape will convert your drawings to G-Code which grbl will interpret and send instructions to the plotter. I use grbl with the Arduino to send G-Code to the printer and a really great way to create G-Code is with the totally free software Inkscape, which has a built-in feature, G-Code tools. Since all three axes are running a stepper motor the pen could be replaced with a router and become a CNC milling machine (in theory). The plotter is comprised of 3 stepper motors each powered by a V4.4 EasyDriver and runs off a 12V DC supply. Inspired by Wikihouse founder, Alastair Parvin, and his proposition that “if design’s great project of the 20th century was the democratisation of consumption… design’s great project in the 21st century is the democratisation of production” I set about the task of building a machine that would be capable of printing my own customised open source Wikihouse from the commons at a 1:100 scale.įor the real Wikihouse project you would use a CNC router and 18mm plywood, but due to time constraints I opted to build a smaller more manageable desktop pen plotter which would still plot accurate CAD drawings. I decided to build this as an accompanying piece of work for my 4th year architecture dissertation at the University of Edinburgh the topic of which is open source architecture and the challenges it poses for the architectural profession. Thank you for taking the time to check out my instructable for an Arduino based X-Y plotter. Update - Have added a step to cover adding a cutting tool.
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