I've spent about three months lazily noodling on the first iteration of a DIY Pen Plotter. It actually plots:
I collected some learnings and resources from the process here: Building a DIY Pen Plotter.
Other than that, I've spent this quarter lazily working on a DIY Pen Plotter, and treating it as a stepping stone towards making a CNC. The plotter was designed and built completely from scratch, and I'm quite pleased with myself that it, in fact, does plot with a pen:
...which we can export, convert to G-code and plot on the DIY Pen Plotter, which was my plan all along:
This article documents my learnings from designing and building a DIY Pen Plotter during the summer of 2023. My ultimate goal is to build my own CNC machine, and a pen-plotter seemed like a good stepping stone towards this project — this is an important context for how I designed this machine, as if I only wanted a pen-plotter, a lot of things could be simplified.