Drop shape

#plotparty day 5 @penplotart

Blue and green watercolours on white card, 70x100 mm

I love creating new 3D printed attachments to teach my plotter new tricks. The mechanics of the rack and pinion worked surprisingly well on the second iteration, and should allow more granular control of the brush height and pressure and a wider range of motion. If I get round to actually adapting the software to it, that is. The first drawings here were made by manually editing the gcode to start the pen lift early and not wait for it to finish before painting the last segment of each drop so they line skills get thinner towards the top.

I've first come across this idea in the paper "An Accessible, Three-Axis Plotter for Enhancing Calligraphy Learning through Generated Motion" (Fang et al, 2024). I designed the extra parts in SolveSpace to fit my existing pen lift setup and used an OpenSCAD gear generator by janssen86 for the rack and pinion shapes.

#penplotter #3dprinting #gears #rackandpinion #experimental

2 months ago