Inspiration
Minecraft has an interesting map mechanic where your character holds a map which "draws itself" while exploring the world. I am also very interested in building a plotter, which is a printer that uses a pen and (XY) gantry to produce images. These ideas seemed to fit together quite well.
What it does
Press a button, copy GPS coordinates and run the custom "gcode" compiler to generate machine/motor driving code for the arduino. Wait around 15 minutes for a 48 x 48 output.
How we built it
Mechanical assembly - Tore apart 3 dvd drives and extracted a multitude of components, including sled motors (linear rails). Unfortunately, they used limit switch + DC motor rather than stepper, so I had to saw apart the enclosure and glue in my own steppers with a gear which (you guessed it) was also glued to the motor shaft.
Electronics - I designed a simple algorithm to walk through an image matrix and translate it into motor code, that looks a lot like a video game control. Indeed, the stepperboi/autostepperboi main source code has utilities to manually control all three axes like a tiny claw machine :)
U - Pen Up D - Pen Down L - Pen Left R - Pen Right Y/T - Pen Forward (top) B - Pen Backwards (bottom) Z - zero the calibration O - returned to previous zeroed position
Challenges we ran into
- I have no idea about basic mechanics / manufacturing so it's pretty slipshod, the fractional resolution I managed to extract is impressive in its own right
- Designing my own 'gcode' simplification was a little complicated, and produces strange, pointillist results. I like it though.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- 24 hours and a pretty small cost in parts to make a functioning plotter!
- Connected to mapbox api and did image processing quite successfully, including machine code generation / interpretation
What we learned
- You don't need to take MIE243 to do low precision work, all you need is superglue, a glue gun and a dream
- GPS modules are finnicky and need to be somewhat near to a window with built in antenna
- Vectorizing an image is quite a complex problem
- Mechanical engineering is difficult
- Steppers are extremely precise, and I am quite surprised at the output quality given that it's barely held together.
- Iteration for mechanical structure is possible, but difficult
- How to use rotary tool and not amputate fingers
- How to remove superglue from skin (lol)
What's next for Cartoboy
- Compacting the design it so it can fit in a smaller profile, and work more like a polaroid camera as intended. (Maybe I will learn solidworks one of these days)
- Improving the gcode algorithm / tapping into existing gcode standard
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