Hi everyone welcome to our new instructables today's project is a mini CNC plotter which have been made using old recycled scratch materials so let's see how it's made
Step 1: Making the Axis for the Plotter
First of all we started by salvaging stepper motor sliders from old CD-DVD drive as we will be going to use them as our x and y axis carriages
Step 2: Building the Base or Structure
I use 5 mm thick ACP sheet to build the main base for the Potter next I mounted the sliders onto it with the help up of some bolts and nuts in combination with some washers and parts of old sketch pen to make an elevated platform for the x-axis, we also used an angular bracket to hold the y-axis firmly perpendicular to the base with this been done our x and y axis is complete now let's move to another step
Step 3: Building the Circuitory
Now as usual be definitely need a circuit to drive our protector for the drivers I have gone for A4988 and for the microcontroller and arduino board more specifically and arduino Nano which I have to repair as it was a salvaged one which I have got for free from my friend you can see how I was able to repair it it in one of my previous videos hence the total materials includes a Servo arduino board A4988 drivers 2 capacitors 100(uf) microfarad each and never the less a perfboard
Step 4: Soldering
now it was time to build the driving circuit for the project so I started soldering everything on a piece of perfboard and it was long and boring process and it took me around 30 minutes to solder everything perfectly on to the perfboard but i was too much excited to complete it that i forgot the tiredness and moved on…
Step 5: Stabilization of the Machine
Next I got to know that my machine does not stay stable due to different size of bolts and nuts so I added pieces of thermocol from old packaging materials that I had laying around using some hot glue to make it stable
Step 6: Making the Servo Cariages
Now we need some kind of mechanism to talk the pen up and down in order to help us to write so I went to make this very simple mechanism (you can see clear pictures above) to do the same job which have been made out of some pieces of ACP sheet and a servo, in combination with a spring and a rod
Step 7: Completion of Hardware
next I glued the servo's mechanism to the y axis and also added a 12 volt adaptor in order to connect to a 12v power adaptor for a4988 drivers to drive the plotter while I chose the USB for powering the arduino itself..
Step 8: SOFTWARE
next part comes the software part we firstly need to install software known as benbox software and update the filmware provided to arduino, next you need to make the same settings as I have done you can see in the picture above
now our project is about to complete just select the pictures that you want to print, resize it as you need it, the cause for choosing this software was that because we need not to convert the images into G code first itsayves much time also we could resize the images very easily and we could also print it in any speed by using user friendly buttons and instructions
Step 10: SUCCESS
Now you can print any pictures, images drawing, text and vectors, etc … in order to get exact copies of them I should tell you that it's very efficient and very attractive to play with I am sure you must have learnt something from it Thanks for giving your time to read my instructables please leave your comments, and doubts below and please share if you made it, also stay tuned, meet you in the next one coming soon:)
