Tiny CNC Drawing Robot – Cost Estimate

A really tiny CNC - a work in progress

A really tiny CNC – a work in progress

One of my goals in designing/building this little robot was to make it really cheap and easy to build.  I’d like to think I’m headed in the right direction.

I would estimate the cost of building (a completed version of) this little robot as follows:

  1. 3x Micro Servos at $6/each
  2. 1x Arduino Uno at $30
  3. 30.6g of ABS plastic for roughly $1.53

I’m going to exclude the bits of wire and pen, and estimate the materials cost of this robot at $49.53 which I’ll round up to about $50.00 since I have to design and print a few more plastics parts.  Basically, if you’ve already got a 3D printer, plenty of plastic, and an Arduino lying around, there’s no reason you couldn’t have a similar robot up and running in no time for about $20.

It’s my hope to use my newly won Adafruit Trinket 5v, courtesy of Hackaday and Adafruit1 , it might even be possible to power all three servos off of a single Trinket ($8) and bring the total cost of the project down to around $28 plus little bits of wire and a pen.

Although I give vague building instructions on the Thingiverse page for the parts of this robot, I hope to have an Ikea/Lego style set of instructions ready in the next day or so.  So far there are only 8 parts (including the two servo motors), so even a team of monkeys taking a break from writing Shakespeare could manage to assemble one of these in a few minutes.

  1. Thanks again!!! []

2 thoughts on “Tiny CNC Drawing Robot – Cost Estimate

  1. Pingback: How to Build a Tiny CNC Drawing Robot | PlotterBot

  2. Hey, I don’t have a 3d printer but I do have a use for this little bot. See, i need to put a stylus in there and use the bot to keep the stylus moving on my iPad while I’m away. So the actual drawing pattern is of no significance in my particular use case. Can I purchase the printed parts from you?

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