Electronic enthusiasts looking for a new project to keep them busy may be interested in this Raspberry Pi pen plotter which is being created using the Windows 10 IoT Core new lightning API. To learn more about the project and links to all the code you will need jump over to the Raspberry Pi projects website by following the link below.
The hardware for this plotter is configured as an H-Bot cartesian frame. An HBot uses a single long toothed belt and two stepper motors to drive the X and Y axes. The configuration has the benefit that both of the the stepper motors are mounted to the frame, which means the central carriage is very light and can move exceptionally fast. The downside of the HBot it is not balanced – if the Y axis is not extremely rigid, there can be racking. The simplicity of this design makes it a quick and easy build.
Features of the building include :
– Camera to capture an image, with a live preview
– Xaml UI to display intermediate stages of the plot
– Dither the input image to generate a series of dots
– Use a travelling salesperson algorithm to connect the the dots using line segments
– Use the line segements to drive an H-Bot style carteisian plotter
– Drive steppers using the Arduino library AccelStepper written by Mike McCauley.
To learn more about different Raspberry Pi operating systems currently available jump over to our previous article which provides information on the best Raspberry Pi OS to use for your project.
Source: PRPi