Pen Plotter - Devlog 5

I’ve been working on a gantry system. Not sure if I mentioned it on the last devlog, but corexy is very very painful to design.

I scrapped that after a while and started work on a much more basic gantry design. As I’m writing this, the parts for that system are printing, so I’ll update this once I have a basic prototype up and running.

I’ve also been working on canny edge detection for the images, which finds the edges in an image and turns them into contours that I can draw on the machine. I used python opencv and recycled a lot of code from the previous line-based approach.

I’ll try out both using lines and contours for drawing images, and I’ll see which works better. I suspect that the lines will look much better, but I’m certain they’ll take ages to draw.

Both these methods still output my custom p-code language which will be used on the pen plotter

Next up, I’ll assemble the basic prototype and try to get it working. While I’m waiting for the parts to print, which will take about another 3 hours, I’ll look into possibly using sine waves to draw things, and changing the amplitude, and also a method using zig zag lines which have variable spacing

Oh, and I also worked on a bit of hardware, because the new system uses an extra stepper motor I had to wire up 2 motors in series which is way easier than using another driver and more precise also