CNC plotter from old parts

posted Mar 31st 2010 4:00pm by
filed under: cnc hacks

Get a quick fix of CNC for the day with this plotter. [Francisco Dulanto] grabbed the cartridge carriage from an old inkjet printer and turned it into a gantry by mounting it on two drawer sliders. The optical head assembly from a cd-rom provides the Z-axis movement with the whole thing controlled by three RepRap boards. [Francisco] called his project a joke compared to the Turing Machine, but we like it and we’re glad he tipped us off. There’s something zen-like about the projects that are thrown together with what you have available. After all, he’s certainly achieve a clean-looking build that does what it’s intended to do.

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23 Responses to CNC plotter from old parts

  • Andrew says:
    March 31, 2010 at 5:07 pm

    The Z-axis looks to be a floppy drive head stepper motor.

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  • Mikey says:
    March 31, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    That seems like everything you would need to make a 3d printer on the cheap (thinking rep-strap).

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  • Mikey says:
    March 31, 2010 at 5:43 pm

    @Andrew maybe the same company who made that cd-rom, also made floppy drives, and used the same motors for both, to save on part-sourcing-costs.

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  • derp says:
    March 31, 2010 at 6:23 pm

    “There’s something zen-like about the projects that are thrown together with what you have available.”

    very much so. this is a great build

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  • Hirudinea says:
    March 31, 2010 at 6:30 pm

    Where’s the Egg?

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  • Nightstar says:
    March 31, 2010 at 7:49 pm

    Nice! Very cool job! ^_^

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  • Andrew says:
    March 31, 2010 at 9:51 pm

    Ok. I see it now. I always find floppy drive motors unsatisfactory as the bearings fall apart when you dismantle them. This looks much more substantial.

    Very cool project. I am eyeing up the printers and CD drives in this office. Too bad someone is using them…

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  • poorhandluke says:
    March 31, 2010 at 11:05 pm

    just pulled some stuff back out of the garbage can

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  • zer0 says:
    April 1, 2010 at 12:53 am

    this is from floopys indeed

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  • svofski says:
    April 1, 2010 at 1:46 am

    Brilliant pen grip!

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  • Amos says:
    April 1, 2010 at 2:40 am

    Plus, add one of those cable-driven rotary tools and boom, instant engraver.

    Extra internets to anyone who does a tutorial on using the motor drivers in these printers/CD-drives, to save the cost of the expensive rep-rap boards. That would make this a /true/ scrap-heap hack (not that it’s not an excellent build already).

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  • svofski says:
    April 1, 2010 at 5:07 am

    Amos: it’s very easy to play with a floppy stepper, I even made a video on that once.

    No parts required at all, only a rotary encoder.

    Re: other hardware, the drivers in consumer hardware can be very different but it is very rare when you get reusable chips. And if you do, you just google them up.

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  • blue carbuncle says:
    April 1, 2010 at 5:41 am

    Very cool! Kinda like high-end circuit bending lol. Keep up the good work :)

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  • nes says:
    April 1, 2010 at 6:14 am

    @Mikey, no CD ROM sleds use a DC motor driven by a transconductance amplifier (as they need the precision), floppy drives simply use a stepper motor as it’s actually part of the spec (gap between tracks on the disk = n*motor steps).

    The amplifier from the CD ROM can be reused, but you have to make your own feedback arrangement for the servo. In the original setting it’s driven by filtered PWM from the optical front-end IC. Just cut the trace and feed in your own signal.

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  • yn0t says:
    April 1, 2010 at 6:19 am

    Damn. I wanted to see what it was drawing.

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  • bothersaidpooh says:
    April 1, 2010 at 7:27 am

    i did have an old epson printer with 3 stepper drivers (was out of an old CX3200) but it went a bit wrong. Good news is the print head survived and is now happily printing in another 3200.

    As for the cdrom sled, I came up with a truly awesome hack involving tapping into the (working) eye signal from the pickup and feeding it into a circular analogue delay line. If the circuitry in the drive thinks it has a valid signal then it doesen’t care what you feed the stepper motor drive.

    this is quite a neat way to built a laser etching jig on the cheap and all that is required is installing a write laser on the sled.

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  • clifdweller says:
    April 1, 2010 at 7:28 am

    I built a plotter like this a couple years ago using the same parts and found it wasn’t suitable as an engraver. The printer system can’t handle the load and gets a lot of backlash usually which can be corrected by replacing the springs in the one cog with a block but there is still a lot of jitter.

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  • Josh says:
    April 1, 2010 at 11:54 am

    great work, did something similar. There’s is much better as its possible to lift the pen.

    http://www.draft-design.com/plotter

    If you have an old scanner laying around and a parallel port its possible to build one of these in an afternoon.

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  • fedeortiz12 says:
    April 1, 2010 at 4:14 pm

    Great work!! Keep it up!

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  • Robert says:
    April 1, 2010 at 7:46 pm

    Just get some ‘real’ linear bearings at http:/www.KCLinear.com
    I got some 16mm that would be perfect for this type of application.

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  • jae686 says:
    April 1, 2010 at 11:04 pm

    Awsome. I’m looking forward to make a CNC, this could be a nice approach to build a test bed for stepper driver / algorithm testing.

    I’m sort of ashamed for not having this ideia earlier…. Kudos for Francisco Dulanto!

    :)

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  • durezas says:
    April 3, 2010 at 2:01 am

    Can you publish some details? Thanks.

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  • Richard says:
    April 4, 2010 at 3:57 am

    I love these ‘repurposing’ type hacks… ‘Makers’ FTW :-)

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