Simple CNC pen "plotter"

Hello everybody! This is the first video I upload to youtube and its about a small project I'm still in the middle of. I have been thinking of building something like this for quite a while now, and finally I decided to build it inspired by numerous experiments people have been doing with simple CNC machines for different kinds of purposes, like simply this, or have a DVD writer laser in place of the pen to be able to engrave/burn wood, plastic and other soft materials. Bare with me as all this is in the experimental stage still. The system is based on 2 scanners, one mounted on top of the other perpendicularly. For control of the stepper motors, I designed and built a simple circuit on a protoboard based on a PIC microcontroller (programmed in C18) and a couple of ULN2003 driver IC's. The driver board is connected to a PC's parallel port, with windows 98 for ease and speed of programming the port aswell in C. The positioning system is half done, as I've yet to program linear movement from one spot to the other. The figure is stored in a simple C array, in X, Y coordinate format 16 bit integer numbers. Pairs of coordinates are sent to the controller board and as soon as they are sent, the scanners begin their movement to reach the desired spot, after this the controller reports to the PC that the scanners have reached their destination and tell the PC that its ready to receive new coordinates.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• cnc
• plotter
• scanner
• stepper

[hoopido]

Wow. Very cool. Great work.

[machopbad]

The best part is Arnold in the background hahaha!

[Stalker6Zauzich]

This runs on a hand-mixer?

[fitzy5533]

hey this looks simple and i would like to know how to make a cnc

[stanislavtokarev]

Very Cool!!!!