[Dave’s] drawbot writes his Facebook wall messages on a whiteboard. The setup is pretty simple, depending on a pair of stepper motors and common household goods. As you can see in the image, the stylus is a plain old dry-erase marker held by a big spring clip (the kind that holds a stack of papers together). What you can’t see is that there’s a kick stand to hold the writing head away from the board when moving to the next plot point.
In this example a cursive font is being used, but [Dave] included two other fonts in the code. Those require the felt tip to be frequently lifted from the board, and a servo motor does this by pressing a cotton swab against the surface. This does erase any marker lines it slides past, but it’s a pretty small area that is lost. To control the motors [Dave] is using the EiBotBoard which was originally designed for the EggBot. It’s got a USB mini-b connector which lets a computer push messages scraped from the Internet. Don’t miss the video demonstration embedded after the break.
A small modification would make this into a pretty nifty light painting rig.
I wanted to build one of these for awhile. I’m definitely gonna look this thing over more in depth for ideas, its pretty good.
As for his comments on a future build and using a lid for the marker, he could use those markers that have a push in and out function to keep the tip from drying out.
That was my first thought as well.
“the video demonstration embedded after the break.”
hahaha..
ho well, nice hack! indeed tempting to make something similar
The video link is embedded above
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FJZvrvfXlE
Its amazing that it work so well!!
I suppose anything at all is better than Timeline…
http://github.com/i-make-robots/drawbot
An open source implementation with assembly instructions and a bill of materials. I need some help getting pen up/down to work. Anyone interested in giving it a shot?
project history is documented here:
http://www.marginallyclever.com/category/drawbot-my-creations/