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Post about pen plotter without video. Hmm, I feel cheated. Random video of old school pen plotter in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cd3GsZlOBg https:
by Torkel 3y ago
Post about pen plotter without video. Hmm, I feel cheated.
Random video of old school pen plotter in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cd3GsZlOBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cd3GsZlOBg
My father still fondly talks about how the crispness of a true pen plot was never really matched by modern printers.
Edit: he has them on a second page: https://szymonkaliski.com/projects/diy-pen-plotter https://szymonkaliski.com/projects/diy-pen-plotter Not as fast as the 1983 version though :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoThey make a weird kids STEM toy that's a surprisingly well thought out pen plotter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSFW5ok3ROc&start=128 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSFW5ok3ROc&start=128 The big arms are attached to the egg thing with two magnets, so a kid shoving their hand into the moving parts is very safe; it just falls apart. And you can see the clever arrangement of the three moving parts (axis 1, axis 2, and lift/drop pen).
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoI have a Watercolorbot[1] which is like the world's most inexact plotter. But it's a lot of fun to watch it pick up paint on the brush and try to paint a gcode version of your design (also funny to see the patterns the slicer algo uses to try and fill blocks of color). Software was always a little fiddly, but still a fun idea. 1: https://watercolorbot.com/ https://watercolorbot.com/
- deepspace 3y ago> crispness of a true pen plot was never really matched by modern printers I don't know about that. Pen plots can, at a push, achieve the equivalent of about 250dpi. Back in the early 90s, I wrote software for the first inkjet “plotter” (a wide format printer that used HP inkjet cartridges, and rasterized HP-GL commands on the fly). Even back then, we could get 600dpi resolution, and today's printers can do up to 2400 dpi.
- dekhn 3y agoThe point is generally no matter how high your DPI, if you're drawing a line using a series of points, compared to drawing a line via a vector process, the vector process will almost always look nicer (for some definition of nicer).
- Torkel 3y agoYeah… but I think what he misses is that it’s a line drawn by a pen. It has a certain analog appeal to it? Vinyl is worse in every way to lossless digital. As is an analog film camera. Or a mechanical watch for keeping time. Still though.
- mkl 3y agoMy mid-1990s Graphtec plotter has a precision of .01mm, or 2540dpi. I don't have any pens for it fine enough for that to matter though, and have yet to build a generic pen-holder (it grabs the pen with magnets...).
- deepspace 3y ago> I don't have any pens for it fine enough for that to matter though Yes, that is the issue. The finest pen you could likely get would be 0.1mm (and even that would be hard to find and expensive). That is what I based the 250 dpi on.