Tag Archives: DIY

Making a Lego puzzle/portrait with my plotter

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My DIY plotter is able to plot on a A4 format. A friend of mine noticed that any drawing that can be plotted on an A4 sheet of paper can be also printed on using a traditional printer, and thus the plotter does not enable making innovative creations.

So I asked myself what my plotter can make that a traditional printer cannot? (I mean, without adding a laser ;) )

Can I put a sheet of paper in a printer? Yes.
Can I put a sheet of cardboard in a printer? Not in any printer.
Can I put a Lego brick in a printer? Definitely no!

The idea is to draw on a sheet of Lego bricks, which “enables” creating a Lego puzzle. Using Lego it is easy to convert the sheet into a desktop portrait.

I made a test creating a Homer Jay Simpson Lego puzzle/portrait.

Ultra-cheap conversion of Gary Fong’s Puffer into a flash bouncer

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Gary Fong’s Puffer is a great idea.

A greater idea is to convert it to a bouncer. Practically at no cost.

All you need is a small rectangle of cardboard (about 12 by 5 cm) and another of aluminium foil. Stick the aluminium foil on the cardboard, so it is more rigid. Put the support bracket of the puffer on the camera and place the cardboard in front of the flash, in the position you think it will work the best. Take note of the two points where the bracket touches the cardboard. Cut two 2 mm holes. Push the cardboard on the bracket, while keeping it at the angle you like. Done!!

The following shots show how it looks on my camera, and samples shots, comparing direct flash with the Puffer and my bouncer.

Note that this mod only makes the light of your flash go up. Then to bounce the flash you need something over the camera on which to bounce it :) . It will work fine in most indoor locations, not so much in rooms with high or dark ceilings (not to say outdoor).
Sometimes, depending on the location I need to compensate under-exposure putting +2/3ev on the flash.

The bouncer add-on is small and flat, and it does not take any additional space in the camera bag where I already store the Puffer.

DIY plotter, the video

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I have finally managed to edit the video of my DIY plotter, I hope you enjoy it!

As you can see from the video, I have put the electronic inside the scanner, and I have improved the pen holder. I have also found an acceptable solution for cables of steppers, and added a reset/halt button.

DIY plotter, Arduino and grblShield inside the scanner body

DIY plotter closed. The red pin is the reset/halt button.

Now the plotter is a self-contained device, with just USB and power plugs (Arduino is power by the USB, the grblShield by a 12V 3.3A power source got from an old monitor).

Links and downloads

To sum up the experience of building this plotter I want to list all the resources that have been useful/necessary for me to complete it. I will follow the direction that goes from having the idea of plotting my “John Moses Olano” picture to actually having it plotted on a piece of paper.

  • A picture of John Moses Olano (yes, it’s me with a John Fitzgerald Kennedy/Barack Hussein Obama/Franklin Delano Roosevelt/George Walker Bush -style name).

    John Moses Olano

  • Inkscape, used for vectorial convertion.
  • Gcodetools, (inkscape plugin) used to produce g-code out of paths, and hatching inside the areas of such paths.
  • JMO in svg format and in g-code format.
  • A script to stream the g-code file, written in processing.
  • An Arduino UNO board (Arduino is the key enabling technology in the whole flow!), loaded with GRBL firmware (which shows off the full power of Arduino).
  • A grblShield plugged on the Arduino (I love how much work it saved to me).
  • From this point on you can’t download or buy an exact replica of what I have used to build my plotter, it is just imagination (and budget, which was low in my case).
  • The X axis: an old parallel port scanner, whose scanning head supports…
  • The Y axis: the core of an old Xerox printer, whose cartridge unit supports…
  • The Z axis: the head movement unit of a floppy disk drive (though I have explored other possibilities), which supports the pen.

All this stuff to draw something on a piece of paper. Something that I could have done with a printer in 20 seconds!

The fun, the satisfaction, the true experience is not in reaching the goal, it is in the travel you do to reach the goal. And this has been a very nice travel, during which I have learnt many new things and met many nice persons.

DIY plotter: up and running!

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UPDATE: see the video and get more info on the whole project.

I have received the grblShield and my DIY plotter has finally connected its hardware body to its software (and firmware) soul… and it worked perfectly!

In this post I’m publishing just a few shots of the complete assembly and the first complete drawing realized with it.

In the next weeks I will prepare some videos of the plotter in action, and at least two tutorial posts on tasks that, in these first experiments, I have found to be non-trivial:

  • Calibrating the grbl firmware parameters.
  • The software chain: from a drawing to a plot.
Now the shots. First of all the complete machine. Continue reading →

Third axis: doing it the Lego way

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The third axis of my DIY plotter is the one that moves the pen up and down while the other two axes move the pen around.

While playing Lego with my daughters I tried to figure out a possible solution based on Lego, and I quickly came out with this design:

It uses a large rubber wheel to transfer the rotation (demultiplying it) to a steering component that converts rotation into the up/down movement. The movement is not perfectly linear, but the approximation is fully acceptable, since the pen needs just a millimeter of vertical motion to detach itself from the paper.
The stepper is firmly held in position just by bricks.
The pen holder is made of the plastic part of two wheels and a rubber band. It is pretty solid and the rubber band helps to keep some pressure between the pen and the paper, when the pen is down.

While it is perfectly working I’m not going to use it in the plotter, because (i) it is not compact, (ii) it does not blend with the rest of the plotter (it is better fit for a completely Lego-based project), and (iii) I don’t want to steal “forever” these bricks from my daughters’ constructions.

I’m working on a solution based on a floppy disk drive that seems promising.