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PewtyBot 1.0

I’ve used this project as a stepping stone and modified it some. I can’t say enough good things about it, it propelled development forward significantly and I found it to be expertly designed. Too bad the project it now defunct. I had to find assembly documentation on archive.org.

I’m not sure I’ll document it as well as I have the tabletop plotter or the gondola one. At least not yet, maybe that’ll be a Christmas project like the other 2. I did port the same software stack, it would be a shame not to given the years of feature development that went into it. Of course we should use these features with lasers. It might also change drastically, I want to investigate what rotating mirrors could do for speed. Currently some of the moving parts of the machine have enough mass that their inertia causes inaccuracies when moving at high speed.

It’s nice to have things tidied up, the development machine was a mess.

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Procrastinated Planning

Driven by necessity, I finalized the plan for construction 2022. I struggled pretty hard on this one, because I tried to figure out many ways to gain half a floor, and I had to think hard about snow management. Ultimately I ended up keeping it to just 1 floor because I do NOT want to mess with the existing tin roof. In Vermont currently contractors are impossible to get, let alone roofers who are notoriously difficult to begin with (and rightfully so). So it was always the plan that I’ll be doing the tin myself, and because of that, I really cannot mess with the existing roof. So this addition has an independent roof line which does not at all integrate with the existing one.

There were a couple of challenges to solve but in the end, it’s a pretty straightforward build. Nicole is getting a whole 12’x16′ all to herself to accommodate all the projects she’s spearheading on the homestead.