New Pens For Old Plotters

Finding consumables is an ever-present problem facing anyone working with old computer hardware. Many of these devices ceased manufacture decades ago and what old stock remains is invariably degrad…

A Compact SCARA Arm Plotter

If you’re unfamiliar with SCARA robots, the acronym stands for Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm. This refers to the fact that the arms are rigid in the Z axis but somewhat compliant in…

Ender 3 Plotter Attachment For Printing Onto Cassettes

One way to look at FDM 3D printers is as machines that turn filament into three-dimensional objects, but at their core they are much more versatile than that. Since they can move just about any too…

Need A Serial Data Plotter? Better Write Your Own

When you’re working with a development team, especially in a supporting capacity, you can often find yourself having to invent tools and support systems that are fairly involved, but don&#821…

CoreXY On The Pi Pico

There are enough off-the-shelf CoreXY mechanisms out there that for the cost of an AliExpress order it’s possible to quickly and cheaply make yourself a plotter. But [Koushani Das], [Mahathi …

Lessons Learned While Building A DIY Pen Plotter

There was a time when plotters were the pinnacle of computer graphics output. While they aren’t as common as they used to be, there are some advantages to having a plotter. [Symon] wanted a p…

Pen Plotter Uses Polar Coordinates

To keep track of a location in a two-dimensional space, two measurements are needed. Most of the time, we would naturally think to do this by the Cartesian method, measuring position along one axis…

Modern Demo For A Casio PB-700 Pocket Computer Plotter

[Fred] has a Casio PB-700 pocket calculator / computer, complete with the companion docking station featuring a four-color pen plotter, model FA-10, and a microcassette tape recorder, model CM-1. H…

Sand Drawing Plotter Runs On ESP32

Humans have always drawn lines in the sand, whether it’s to communicate a plan of attack or to indicate metaphorically a very real boundary. It’s also something we do just for the aesth…

Irreproducible, Accumulative Hacks

Last weekend, I made an incredibly accurate CNC pen-plotter bot in just 20 minutes, for a total expenditure of $0. How did I pull this off? Hacks accumulate. In particular, the main ingredients wer…

Purpose-Built Plotter Pitches In To Solve Wordblitz On Your Phone

It seems like most hackers have never played a game without at least wondering how to cheat at it. It’s not that we’re a dishonest lot, at least not as a rule. It’s more that most…

Hackaday Links: June 26, 2022

Head for the hills!! We’re all doomed! At least that’s the impression you might get from the headlines about the monster Earth-facing sunspot this week. While any sunspot that doubles i…

This Arduino Pen Plotter Is Built For Speed

We see a lot of simple pen plotter projects around here, and while we appreciate them one and all, most of them are a little on the slow side. That’s OK — a glacial pace is sometimes al…

All The Sticky Labels You Could Ever Need: No DRM, Just Masking Tape

Printable sticky labels are a marvelous innovation, but sadly also one beset by a variety of competing offerings, and more recently attempts by manufacturers to impose DRM on their media. Fortunate…

Multicolor Drawbot Highlights Importance Of Limit Switches

Plotters and drawing robots are fun projects that let you create art with all the precision and perfection that computer numerical control can deliver. [TUENHIDIY] demonstrates that ably with the M…

Fumik: An Arduino Wall Drawing Robot Jellyfish

If you’ve ever wanted to build a large format plotter but didn’t have the floor space, maybe put it up against the wall and make it cute. That’s the idea behind Fumik, the wall-dr…

CX-6000 Pen Plotter Upgrade

[Terje Io] decided to breathe new life into an old pen plotter — the CX6000 from C. Itoh, a Japanese company that made several printers for Apple in the 1980s. He keeps most of the framework,…

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Ballpoint Typewriters

So you want to minimize finger movement when you type, but don’t have three grand to drop on an old DataHand, or enough time to build the open-source lalboard? Check out these two concept kee…

Servo Plotter Needs Nothing Exotic

Although the widespread use of 3D printers has made things like linear bearings and leadscrews more common, you still can’t run down to your local big-box hardware store and get them. However…