Masking Tape Plotter

Bart Dring, the guy who made the pen servo patch for Grbl has not been resting on his laurels, but created a whole new Grbl derived CNC controller firmware called FluidNC, which has support for both RC-servos and Solenoids. 

Slow progress on a simplified version using a pivoting z-axis. I realized that it's quite hard to exactly reproduce the Grbl settings that I used on the first version. But there are now exciting new options with Grbl running on ESP8266 or ESP32. I could for example use a smartphone to have the gcode generated by a webservice and then upload the whole resulting gcode to Grbl via wifi. 

The y-axis is getting radically simpler:

Yes, that's the whole thing. Gets rid of a whole lot of parts. Will have to see how this will hold up over time. 

A marker pen is a very simple thing to make, So I made my own, adding lightness.  Edding sells replacement nibs, so that's what i used here. 

The z-axis will change from the linear kind used now to a pivoting style, like on an egg-bot.