[lukey_q]

Awesome to see pen plotter stuff posted here with more frequency. This project is pretty amazing in its frugality, kudos to the author. I have another pen plotter and I'd highly recommend pen plotting to anyone who's into generative art or anything similar, it's really fun to write a few lines of code to generate some visuals and then watch the plotter as your design is made into something tangible.

I'm working on a (free) app around making drawings on your computer, putting some effects on them, and sending them directly to a pen plotter. So far it only works with axidraw because that's the only one I have, but ultimately it's just sets of coordinates so it could be adapted for other plotters pretty easily. I'll post it here once it's in a decent state :)

[romwell]

FWIW, every 3D printer is also a pen plotter (just stick a pen to your print head!).

Here's my old faithful Printrbot plotting a dragon curve:

Fountain pen, timelapse: https://www.instagram.com/p/BlQHk43gwra/

Fountain pen, final image: https://www.instagram.com/p/BlJHawZgFi1/

Ballpoint, realtime: https://www.instagram.com/p/BlJ8dgmAaTA/

[aallen90]

That's awesome! What print speed did you use? (your steppers sounded like it was very high) And do you slice 1st layer normally?

[romwell]

Thanks! I didn't use a slicer, went straight into G-code for that one (wrote a program that generates the G-code for the dragon curve: a sequence of G0 commands).

Don't remember what the feedrate was; with the pen attached tight, I could go pretty fast.

[andrepd]

I built a plotter with my now old mindstorms kit, the old RCX brick :) (just built and programmed, design was from lego).