Jim Wink's Make Blog

I recently spent some more time working on my Drawbot, which is now called a Makelangelo . I don't mind the name change since that makes it easier to find in web searches. I'm not sure of the source of my renewed interest. Possibly because the awesome folks at MarginallyClever.com are frequently making updates to both software and hardware. Possibly also because, like many makers, every so often I get the urge to make something. Or in this case, improve on what I've already made. One of the first changes I made was to how the stepper motors were attached. I still like the idea of not attaching the motors to the board directly. I instead attached them to these corner units I created that hang off the board proper. The reason I do this is because I keep thinking I'll make a bigger board eventually. Building these units once and then shifting them to a new board should, in theory, be easy. Anyway, during a trip to a local hardware store I found some Nylon or plastic...

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 Motorsh...

Axman Surplus is awesome. I've been thinking of building a CNC . There are a number of articles on the web that'll walk you through building a CNC, including this one on how to build a desktop CNC . That one, in particular, could use a tool I already have - a Dremel. Anyway, a CNC is complicated. There's a whole language used for communicating with CNC's called g-code , that is pretty much a complete mystery to me. Then there's taking 3-d models and converting them to g-code, and probably any number of details I don't have figured out. It'd be a bigger project than I've tackled so far. But like anything, I've got to start somewhere, so I figured I'd start with equipment I already have. In this case I'm referring to the Motor Shield I got from Adafruit . I built it a while back and then set it aside and never used it. So I figured this was a good time. I'd already figured out how to run a servo on the Arduino, but the Motor Shield has p...