This is a cylindrical-coordinate movement platform for a 3D printer. (It isn't capable of printing right now though.)
I wanted to build a small 3D printer from e-waste. CD/DVD drives are very common, but they transverse a very short distance ~1.5in, which is very very small. I recently found a large stepper motor with a large gear from the paper feed mechanism of a printer, so I figured that if I replaced one of the Cartesian axes with a rotating base, I could almost double the volume I could print in, since one drive would be able to print onto a circle of radius ~1.5in: a cylindrical printer. One benefit of building such a small printer was that driving the motors would be simple using H-bridges (and could even be powered directly off the Arduino.) The small amount of parts meant that it would be easy to build my own circuit board as well using vector board.
I did realize that adding the plastic extruders and filament feeders was very complex (and I was still considering trying to build some of my own,) but building the platform and motion axes was still a difficult task under time constraints.
In the end I was able to get the "r" and "z" axes to work, but the large stepper motor I salvaged seems to be broken, moving erratically. I was able to work up some of the rudimentary functions that would be needed to run the printer, like the position tracking and reversing direction, and later I'll hopefully have a good enough understanding of G-code to write a more complete software.
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