Pen plotters

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CK722ED
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Joined: Mon Sep 06, 2004 1:01 am
Location: Costa Mesa, CA
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Pen plotters

Post by CK722ED »

Is there any application in robotics for the pen drive motors/drivers used in plotters ?
I have several HP's and couple of Houston's.
Ed
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haklesup
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Post by haklesup »

Conceptually speaking, I bet you could affix those motors to anything (size and torque compatible to the motor) and use the same driver electronics and PC interface and a plotter file to control their position.

Creating a S/W application to translate things like move up or down to an HPGL file would be the hard part. The file format already has codes for moving the motors and how far (maybe how fast) and it is ASCII editable and scalable.

Otherwise, you would have to know the motors in detail and either create your own driver, hack the existing one for a different interface or use a 3rd party controller. I presume these would be low torque stepper motors. Two of them plus a solenoid of some kind to raise the pen and another to grip the pen.

Furthermore, since the interface is probably an RS232 serial cable, it wouldn't be too hard to build a hand held controller based on a PIC or uController to spit out the proper binary commands (ascii characters) based on user inputs or stored memory. Hardware is basic (keypad, chip, memory, interface) but as usual, the software/firmware is the real work. I bet a palm computer and IR interface is possible.
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