After creating CNC routers composed of commonly available materials in previous HackadayPrize entries, I'd like to give you more ideas of how to create own computer controlled machines, address weak points in mechanics or electronics and do some coding to control your hardware.
What ideas? Well, I don't know yet. I simply trust my inspiration and hope the Hackaday community will leave comments every now and then. So follow this project and read the log entries to see what's going on, here...
A couple of more parts turned my plotter into a dot matrix printer. It's for sure no replacement for an inkjet, but another educational tool that visualizes the difference between vector and bitmap graphics. I am utilizing the filament extruder to speed up the movement of the pen.
I have turned a 3D printer into a plotter with automatic pen changer:
Up to four colours are picked automatically during plots. I have written a command line program in C to access the plotter through USB and a Perl script to convert Scalable Vector Graphics into Gcode commands. More on my pages: