Bac À Sable

This project is a school project meant to be an introduction to quick prototyping. In this instructable, we will show you how to make a table that allows you to draw in sand.

The main idea behind this project is to used a discarded creality printer for its pieces to make something fun.

For this project, you will need :

1. An old Creality 3d printer for parts
2. 1 Arduino UNO
3. 1 breadboard
4. 2 potentiometers
5. 2 limit switches
6. Alimentation 12V
7. 2 drivers moteurs
8. 2 moteurs pas à pas
9. Wooden planks (2m by 1m)
10. PLA
11. Fontainebleau Sand
12. Magnets

The recquired devices are :

1. A laser cutter
2. A 3d printer

The structure is built using the aluminum profiles of the printers and one worm screw motor is used to drive a mobile profile along the Y axis, while another motor on this same profile drives the magnets along the X axis.

The first step is to design the 3d printed pieces that will be used to :

1. Hold the magnets and attach them to the belt
2. Attach wheels (ball bearings) to an aluminum profile
3. Bolt both ends of the worm screw motor down to the aluminum profiles
4. Create a ball shaped housing to put a magnet for our magnetic ball

The second step is to build the overall structure that will hold everything together. The main frame holds the worm screw motor down. This motor is used to drive the Y movement of the magnet.

The magnets are placed in the 3d printer piece designed in step 1 and this piece is itself bolted to an aluminum profile placed on wheels. The main frame acts as rails for the wheels of this profile.

The belt is attached to this same 3d printed piece in order to drive the X movement.

For this step, you'll need your Arduino Uno as well as some cables, your breadboard ...

The motors are plugged into the arduino as per the electrical circuit shown above.

Part of the fun is to figure out how to make this wiring yourself, so good luck

2 potentiometers are used to drive the motors.

Here's our code.

It includes the driving of the motors as well as some code to limit the small gitters that the potentiometers can cause.

The potentiometers need to be calibrated in order to work with the dimensions of your table, in our case the drawing area is 25cm by 25cm.

For our box, we used 6mm medium and a laser cutter to get the pieces for our box.

We also built a small square on top to keep the sand in a confined area.

Once you've assembled everything, you can put your sand in and draw some stuff.

You've made it to the end, you now have a far too cumbersome drawing table.

Here is the initial instructable that inspired us to make this drawing sand table :

https://www.instructables.com/Mini-Sisyphus-Sand-Table/