Drawbots

I love the idea of Drawbots!

What’s a Drawbot? It’s a little CNC machine used for drawing or painting. They’re typically 2D devices that are suspended on cables. If you’ve been to an amphitheater event any time recently that had a lot of video, you may have seen a video camera suspended on something similar. Here is a typical Drawbot:

In this case, the Drawbot hangs on the wall as a piece of kinetic art. It takes hours or days to finish a piece, but its always busy doing something, so is interesting to look at. Here’s a close up of the piece its working on:

There’s a fair amount of scoop on Drawbots over on the Makezine site. As I understand it, you can run a Drawbot with Mach3 by putting the correct math into the formulas for the axes. In this case, we have to simulate X and Y motions using the string droop.

I’ll have to try and make one some time. I’ve seen some set up for doing large commercial sign painting that seemed cool. Van murals, anyone?

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