| I'm actively working on one of these right now. What you are talking about I refer to as 2.5 axis machine vs the traditional 3 axis PLA/FDM printer. Aka a plotter. Using an inkjet cartridge or a laserjet toner on a piece of paper outside the context of the printer it was designed for seems foolhardy at best... but what about moving a pen up and down? Shameless plug, I've been working on a project called Robot Draws You! (www.robotdrawsyou.com). I'm currently using an off-the-shelf machine and the software / cloud hoops it requires me to jump through were enough to convince me to build my own machine. For the proof of concept I'm using a Duet2 board, but eventually I want to write some code that will sit on a raspi and talk to the Duet to allow the machine a more granular drip-feed style control over the "printing" process". More on that later. "Why is it hard?" The challenge starts with taking in a given SVG file, making sure it scales / fits within the bounds of a given writeable area, and then generating GCODE to send to the printer / plotter. Because there's no extruder, custom GCODE needs to get created to take advantage of the GPIO pins to move a servo up/down to control the pen. The software challenge is replacing the much-hated cloud interface I complain about. It may suck, but it does a lot and it actually works. The more I use "the cloud", the more I am reminded it does not provide adequate controls/info on: - The size of the rendered image relative to the writeable area - The order in which the layers of the file get rendered - Information about the progress / time left per layer - Repeatability of failed layers without re-writing entire project So crazy me decided "I'll make my own plotter UI and hardware!" It's slow going but it's really fun and I enjoy the challenge. The end solution is going to be a mix of hardware and software that allows you to upload an SVG / vector file to a web UI, start/stop/repeat layers and control the order of the rendering. I like to make drawings of people, and also want to use this to make gigantic maps as well. |
There are tons of OS boards and software already developed around this problem, you don't have to do it all yourself.