White board plotter

thingiverse

Introducing my homemade whiteboard string-plotter! It utilizes inexpensive 28BYJ-48 5V stepper motors for its mechanical parts. For details, check 'Instructions'. I faced an issue with the pen guide's length, so added extensions to hold an 'Expo' dry erase marker. The carriage has a small servo to retract the pen and move without drawing. Dental floss serves as string, while knitting yarn helps in easy carriage rotation. For electronics, a Teensy 3.0 microcontroller board and a HC-05 Bluetooth module are used. The plotter is wireless! Two software solutions were implemented: a Perl script for cartesian moves and an Android app for doodling and sending results. I also created scripts to render photos as line drawings based on image 'darkness'. Plotting complex photos takes around 1.5 hours due to stepper motor speed limitations. Check the provided links for controlling scripts and code.