New PlotterBot Drawing – Calvin & Hobbes on a wagon

PlotterBot drawn Calvin & Hobbes on a wagon

PlotterBot drawn Calvin & Hobbes on a wagon

The other I came home from work and decided I just had to draw something.1 I decided on the above picture of Calvin & Hobbes and set the robot to work.  The drawing is big – about 29″ tall and 28″ wide.

While my tallest drawing remains the Yoda, this is definitely the widest drawing I’ve managed thus far.  I’m also pleased with my rather simplistic method of centering the robot.2 If the centering were off, the remainder of the drawing would be skewed.  And, as you can see from the horizontal lines, there isn’t any observable skewing.

There are some very mild artifacts in the drawing – spots where the pen wasn’t lifted far enough off the paper, some areas where you can see how the pen lifted up and down, and places where the shading/hatching doesn’t exactly line up perfectly with the outline of the drawing.  Even with these minor issues, I’m really happy with the drawing.

  1. I feel like when I don’t “make” something for a little while I get kinda twitchy. []
  2. I’ll be adding a tutorial for this later – it’s a lot simpler than you might think… []

Pen Lift Achievement Unlocked!

Drawing vectors with the PlotterBot

Drawing vectors with the PlotterBot

I recently developed a simple printable pen holder for my PlotterBot.  Although it worked wonderfully as a pen holder for single-line drawings and although I had designed it to work with a servo for pen lifts, I had literally never tried actually using it with pen lifts until yesterday.

Above is my first attempt to draw vectors with pen lifts and, frankly, it came out beautifully.  The design of the pen lift system could not be any simpler.  The pen holder has a mount for the micro servo which holds it as close as possible to the wall-facing surface of the pen holder and a rectangular hole for allowing the servo’s arm to sweep through.  I was concerned that the sweeping action of the servo arm would cause a slight stray mark on the paper.

Despite my concerns, the pen lift test was successful.  It really came down to a matter of balance.  Once I had swapped in a different pen lift arm and connected the pen lift servo cable, I was able to easily adjust the balance by changing the location of the filament attachment.  With the proper balance achieved, the pen lift essentially worked flawlessly.

Today I tried my longest drawing ever, an 8-hour process, with voluminous pen lifts.  The result was… amazing.

Stay tuned for a picture.