2D Pen Plotter - From old Tevo Tarantula parts by Murk3D

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

From old parts scrapped from a Tevo Tarantula, I designed this 2D Pen Plotter.
Tevo Parts used:
All extrusions
3 Nema 17 40mm motors
GT2 Pulley and idler
Flex coupling
6x Wheels
Leadscrew
MKS Base 1.4 board
Things I had to add myself:
2nd leadscrew
2nd flex coupler
Z pancake stepper
2 smaller wheels
PSU (Got a laptop supply)
4x Stepper smoothers (Are NOT required, I had them collecting dust)
4x Aluminium corner brackets (Can be printed)
2x 8mm wood rods
Y endstop (can be configured to use no endstops at all, but I had one extra in supply"
The first iteration of the design.
Insted of the pen being lifted/put down in linear fashion, I simply strapped the pen to the motor shaft with a rubberband. This worked, but the pen would only touch the paper about 40% of the time that it should.
Second iteration/final iteration.
Designed a system that converted the radial motion from the motor, to linear motion on the pen using a quarter gear and a rack traveling on sanded and lubricated wooden rods. This works much better than the first iteration, and the pen is touching the paper close to 90% of the time that it should. It's not perfect. I want to add a piece of flat and sanded wood to the machine to put the paper on instead of my skewed desk, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.
Firmware.
I used Marlin 1.1.X. It is configured to use the second Extruder port/driver for the secondary Y axis motor in config_adv.h. Extruders and heatbed has been disabled, and mintemp has been decreased to -50 on both, to counteract mintemp errors in host software.
Producing Gcode.
So far, I've only used Inkscape to generate Gcode from images/.SVG.
Here's the guide I followed:https://www.norwegiancreations.com/2015/08/an-intro-to-g-code-and-how-to-generate-it-using-inkscape/
Protip: When tracing bitmap, it matters what option you have selected to the left of the preview, when you press accept. USE COLOR in most cases. It took me about 20 hours to realise this. Color Scans = how many times your pen is gonna draw the same line.
I have been told it's also possible to use Cura to generate the Gcode, but I haven't tried it yet.
I have left the original radial pen holder in the parts files, if you want a simpler design that works.
Parts incorporated from other Thingiverse projects:
Flat brackets (thing:2503622)
Corner brackets (thing:2577774)
Endcaps (thing:2396127)
TPU feet (thing:1766030)