I have yet to crack the math, I’ve been banging my head against the wall with various implementations but this is a lot worse than the Gondola’s double polar system. I’d like the laser to be able to project a cartesian system in any position relative to the surface it’s drawing on. Alas, I’ve only been able to get decent results in ideal positions.
Burning Brush
For Posterity
The first successful prototype of PewtyBot.
Philip from Germany got in touch to tell me about a cool project he had seen that involved photoluminescent paper. He thought maybe PlottyBot could so something with it, and maybe it could, but not fast enough I thought. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it though, with the PlottyBot software stack, but a different machine. I love that people get in touch to show me cool things. I’ve been working on plotters for years now, and in some sense it felt like I had turned every stone. Out of nowhere Philip got in touch and steered me toward a whole new area of exploration. Of course one can buy glow-in-the-dark paper, of course I can shoot lasers at it, of course all the algorithms I’ve been working on these past years lend themselves to this new endeavor. Well, with some tweaking :).
It was a real struggle to get Trinamic drivers working on a Pi, but I wanted to step up my motor stepping game. Once I figured it out, holy shit do they work! There’s much else to talk about here, but this isn’t the point of this post, I just want to capture the miletones that is shooting lasers super fast at photoluminescent paper. I still haven’t wrapped my mind around what this all means.