DrawBot
A while back I ran into an article on Make about a Vancouver maker named Dan Royer. The article talks about a kit for something called a DrawBot . The DrawBot uses two stepper motors hung at the upper corners of a flat board. On the steppers are spindles of mono-filament line (fishing line) and between them is a pen. On the board is paper. Running the steppers is an Arduino and a Motorshield . The goal? Have the computer (connected to the Arduino) tell the Drawbot to draw something on the paper. Brilliant, right? Check out his site for videos of the DrawBot doing it's thing. Very cool. The sketch on the Arduino is code written by Dan that is essentially a G-code interpreter. It'll take instructions sent to it by the connected computer and direct the pen accordingly. This is something I'd been looking for: a way to learn G-code, by doing. Seeing as I already had an Arduino. Not an Uno, mind you - a Duemilanova '328 board, but still. I also have a Motorshiel