XY plotter from old scanners

I found some old photo scanners for free on craigslist so I thought I'd turn them into a plotter. I used an old microcontroller I had laying around to control the stepper motors and servo for the pen along with a bipolar stepper driver I got off sparkfun.com.

This is a video of the plotter drawing a sine wave. It was amazing being able to move the pen across the page and move it exactly back to where it started with such little effort. One scanner is pretty old and could only achieve 1200 steps per inch while the other is only a few years old and gets 5000 steps per inch.

Video edited with Blender.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• xy
• table
• plotter
• servo
• stepper
• unipolar
• bipolar
• pwm
• atmega
• atmega324
• avr
• ftdi
• sparkfun
• ROB-09402
• pen
• npn

[jard18]

why did you use all these gears?! it makes your plotter slower. In fact, you don't need all this torque... so you can speed up your system just removing some gears

[saltedguy]

@jard18 I probably could have removed some gears, but they came with the scanners I used, so I just left them alone. I'm not trying to make the fastest plotter, just something for fun.

[davademon]

looks like you finally found a use for that physics book..

[jortijn]

Hi what kind of software did you use or just home made software?

[jortijn]

Hi what kind of software did you use or just home made software?

[xato909]

awesome, its hard to do? i really want to learn how to build one *_*

[mccloud47]

I'm curious what software your using to drive the plotter. I'm built my own running from an arduino, but I'm having a bear of a time getting the servo control for the pen working, Any tips would be awesome.