Whiteboard Vertical Drawbot (No Counter-weight) (WIP) by MacGyverr

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

A redesign of a vertical drawbot so that there is no need for side weights.
Currently I use the Makelangelo software and firmware by www.marginallyclever.com on an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 and RAMPS 1.4 Controller with an LCD 2004 screen.
My belts kept slipping when using hanging weights even with 1lb worth of weight, this design uses no counter-weights for the belts only on the gondola, instead it uses a spring (from a 3D printer bed leveling kit) to push a bearing into the belt against the stepper pulley (sandwiched between) and this keeps the belt's teeth in the pulley and keeps it from slipping better than any counter weights ever could.
It was designed so that it can be attached temporarily to large whiteboards. It uses 8 neodymium magnets (60mmx10mmx5mm) in the slots to help hold the parts down onto the whiteboard. The clamps keep it from moving down or in. I've made the clamps in 3 pieces so that they can be printed easier.
I've included 4 different clamp styles including ones that go behind the board to help hold it.
I've included 3 different gondola weight boxes but I use the smaller one and it works just fine.
WIP MOD:
1x Arduino Mega 2560 R3.
1x RAMPS 1.4 Controller.
1x LCD 2004.
1x Micro Servo Motor 9G SG90.
2x Nema 17 Stepper Motor.
2x Bed Leveling Spring.
1x 608RS 8 x 22 x 7 mm Deep Groove Ball Bearing.
2x 16 Teeth Timing Belt Pulley for 3D Printer 6mm Belt.
8x 3mm washers (two on either side of the pulley arm screw)
2x 633ZZ Deep Groove Ball Bearings 3mm Inner Dia 13mm OD 5mm Bore Double Shielded Chrome Steel Z2.
GT2 Timing Belt Width 6mm.
Various 3mm bolts.
All the parts are on my TinkerCad page for modification. It also has a model of it fully assembled and part notes.https://www.tinkercad.com/things/bOrlq1LccAf-vertical-drawbot-for-a-whiteboard-wip/
The only real problem with a drawbot is the software. Most software will do pictures and designs with no issues, but they often don't optimize it for specific use cases. In other words, most if used on a whiteboard will drag the gondola back and forth through previous lines and therefore erase some of it, whereas drawing top down only would solve this, I've seen no software that does this as a setting.
I was really hoping to use this for writing text on a whiteboard, but not only will most software drag through text already there, most software will only output in large hollow letters because of the nature of vector drawings of text. Filling in the hollow letters is also a lot harder than you think it might be. You can use special single stroke fonts or Hershey Text plugins to combat this, but that often requires other steps. Simply taking a text document and having the drawbot put it on a whiteboard with single stroke letters from the top down is something I can't do without a bunch of steps. I only wish I had the time to teach myself python (or in the case of Makelangelo, java) so I could fix these deficiencies myself.
I use Makelangelo and for the most part it lets me do what I want with my drawbot aside from letting me easily put text on the board in a top down manner.