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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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Laser Pew Pew

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.

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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.