I can make them pretty fast now, I bought top notch stepper drivers and servos for it. It’s so much quieter than the previous one. I’m learning that it makes no sense to buy cheap hardware when you’re not doing volume. The few bucks saved will be paid for many times over in wasted time. I took pictures for documentation but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to sink into it.
A lot of refinements went into this one, from the thousands of hours that the previous model was in use.
This was the very first model, built long before I got into tabletop plotters:
It’s pretty pathetic to look at 🙂 but it was a good stepping stone. I built another other one for teaching based on cheap 28BYJ-48 steppers. All this to say Gondola PlottyBot v2 is very much the result of a journey.
Hi Ben,
My machine is working. I don’t know how to draw everything yet. I’m still learning.
Can you tell me what you used to draw the child’s face? The curved line.
I used DrawingBot v3 for this one. They have a free version but I eventually caved and bought the full one, which is worth every penny. It’s very well made and has a whole lot of line algorithms to play with. But do look around, part of the fun is to find random programs online, get them working and combine them.
So glad your machine is working 🙂
I have been putting off making my own! Even if you don’t get around to publishing the documentation on the build, I would to see the part list so I can take start heading in a good direction! New to the electronics/coding side of things, but know the fab side of things!
Hi Jeff,
you’re in luck, I did at least start the documentation and made it to the parts list.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSD6yetFgq38F0eHj4gdnsRh9ZRYtyIlyyOOYPlpEnQVU-u465uDxSdWY4o5XRcBivyGF9Eb1wui4Iq/pubhtml
It is not final yet but this is definitely the bulk of it. The coding side should be taken care of, unless you want to explore programmatic ways to generate GCode. And the electronics is not too hard if you take it step by step and test in between, though this version will be documented for soldering and not the easy undo/redo dupont connectors.
I hope you do build one, I’ve had tons of fun with mine :).
Amazing! Thank you so much. I’m stoked to tinker with the build, I have some ideas for how I want to rig it up. And my go to modeling and drafting software is Rhino so I may play around with Grasshopper to generate some interesting GCode. Once I get around to the full build I’ll be sure to follow up! Thanks again Ben!!