Cheap DIY $70 Drawing Machine Part 1: Putting the Image on Notepad

One day, while searching for cnc machines and drawing machines, I found out that most of them were above 150 dollars. The main costing of the project was the rods and the stepper motors. So, I took it as a challenge and tried making it under $70 using an Raspberry Pi Car.

This is Part 1 of the project in which we code the files used to convert the image to a notepad file which will be easily readable by the program used to move the car. We will create that in Part 2.

Software needed:

1. Python
2. Text file viewer(notepad, Notepad++,etc)

It will be good if you download the code from this Github link.

Go to python.org (opens in new tab) and click on downloads. Click on the name of your OS. Under stable realises download the latest version. This project is done with python 3.10.2

Now, go ahead and open the downloaded Github Code in the terminal and write:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now, also create 2 folders inside the main folder:

1. input (small "i" is important)
2. output (small "o" is important)

Go to google and search for any clipart black and white image and download it in the input folder. The file should be a jpg image I am using a masterpiece created by me🙄. Now, run main.py, and just tell the name of your file. Let it run for a minute or 2. When it shows all done, open how_to_do.txt and zoom out(ctrl-) and see the image! I drew a wobbly image so the result was also wobbly.