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Built Me Another

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.

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SketchyBot 1.0

I finally built a standard sized one. I ran into a few unexpected challenges given how smooth the small one went.

It really isn’t the most accurate machine, the belts inside aren’t timed, but it does pretty ok with some rendering algorithm and is fun.

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X,Y Coordinates Redux

As is now tradition, I taught my session on X,Y coordinates to local 5th graders.

As before, the collaborative drawing website I made worked wonder for getting them to time-share on the drawing machines. Each of them picks a square and works on it, I disable actual drawing for the class and they can only “code” with go_to(x,y) type commands. When they submit their drawing, the machines get to work. Kids absolutely love the idea of controlling the machines, and having that bit of time to shine as their drawing is being rendered. They are all extremely motivated to figure out the minutia of the code to these effects.

It looks like I bring a new machine every other year, we started with the tabletop plotter, then I added the gondola one, and of course this year it was lasers!

The kids really loved it as I suspected they would. I have learned that light management is a bit of an issue in the classroom when it needs to be dark but not too dark. Something to improve for next year.

It was a good crowd this year and I’ve been tempted to see if I could do something extra having some of them build the etch-a-sketch plotter.