I always thought of plotters as legacy tech, but considering the variety of marking tools you can attach to the head, I'm wondering if I should get one.
Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?
I made one for roughly $100 USD from an Arduino, steel rods, some stepper motors, and some 3D printed parts.
Having an existing 3d printer is a bit “draw the rest of the owl” for this, but being able to extend and modify a device like a pen plotter is pretty nice.
AxiDraw from Evil Mad Scientist was what a lot of us were buying a few years ago. He's now part of Bantam Tools and is making a thing called the NextDraw. Same design but better built and a lot more expensive. https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw
There's a world of cheaper unbranded Chinese plotters that folks are using that seem to work well. Quality does matter, you want something very precise and stable.
I paid $475 for an AxiDraw V3 (A4 size) in 2021. I'm not saying the new machines are bad value, they seem very nicely built. But it's definitely less of an impulse purchase at $1000.
Yes. But no geek should be getting a Cricut when the Silhouette machines exist and are not so locked down and cloud encumbered.
ETA: I guess a true maths geek nerd artist would probably want something more modular and larger anyway, but the Silhouette machines are varied, interesting, support a pretty well documented protocol (GPGL, a variant of/alternative to HPGL I think) and are supported in Inkscape and Python.
Seconded. My Silhouette is great. I even emailed them and received a copy of the GPGL docs one time. It wasn't full on support, but they were willing to give me a start.
The first thing I programmed was having it draw a hilbert curve and it worked great!
The Bantam 'Next Draw' is what EMS used to sell. I bet it probably still uses the same board as the eggbot to drive it. Their new ones in a frame are cool, but one of the cool things with the nextdraw style is that you can plot on things that you can't fit in the frames.
I've used my axidraw to plot on floors and walls in the past.
You could find a Silhouette Portrait 2 on eBay pretty cheaply. It has a reasonable range of tools, python and inkscape support and a reasonable, documented protocol.
As a side note, I bought an Aliexpress $25 'hanging arduino plotter' - I was never able to get good results from it sadly - though I felt a learnt a lot from it and scratched the plotter itch that I had.
I'd also be very interested in a 'good' cheapish plotter - to try a few things that I was never able to with the extra low quality one that I bought
A typical filament 3d printer is just a pen plotter with a fancy toolhead and an extra fancy 'pen up'. ( I explained to a friend once that a pen plotter is doom (2.5d) and a 3d printer is quake). Hell a laser cutter is just a pen plotter with a pen you turn off instead of lifting.
We've got a couple at the engineering/automation company I work for. They're huge, probably 8 feet long at least. No idea what they were used for - they belonged to the engineering group. Unfortunately I can't ask because they all quit.
Large-scale stuff like blueprints is the obvious explanation, but the largest plotter I've ever personally seen was owned by an oil exploration company and used to graph their seismic test results. Only about 5 feet wide (just over 1.5 m), though.
Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?