Two Dimensional Plotter

Plotter is generally composed of driving motor, interpolator, control circuit, drawing table, pen holder, mechanical transmission and other parts. In addition to the necessary hardware, the plotter must also be equipped with rich drawing software. Only with the combination of software and hardware, the modern plotter can realize automatic drawing. The software includes basic software and application software. There are many kinds of plotters. According to the structure and working principle, they can be divided into two categories: roller plotter and table plotter. When the x-direction stepping motor drives the drum to rotate through the transmission mechanism, the sprocket will drive the drawing to move, thus realizing the x-direction movement. The y-direction movement is realized by the y-direction stepping motor driving the pen holder. This plotter has compact structure and large drawing area. But it needs to use special drawing with chain holes on both sides. ② platform plotter. The drawing platform is equipped with a crossbeam, the pen holder is installed on the crossbeam, and the drawing is fixed on the platform. The stepper motor drives the crossbeam and the pen X-direction frame to move in X direction; the y-direction stepper motor drives the pen frame to move in Y direction along the crossbeam guide rail. There are three methods to fix the drawing on the platform, namely vacuum adsorption, electrostatic adsorption and magnetic strip compaction. The platform plotter is widely used because of its high precision and no special requirement for drawing paper.

This two-dimensional plotter model I borrowed from fusian360 three-dimensional modeling software, according to the previous information about the size, structure and control of the plotter on the network to carry out fine modeling of the two-dimensional plotter. With the help of fusion360 to assemble the components of 2D plotter, we can design the link form, and then through the rendering function, we can render the 3D model of 2D plotter to make the 2D plotter more real.

Figure is the two-dimensional plotter model that I made in fusion 360. Through continuous modification and improvement of the final model, the overall structure of the model is simple and clear, which directly reflects the structure of each part.

As shown in Figure 2, the bracket is composed of four slides made of 2020 aluminum material. The reason why this material is used is that it is cheap and light. A stepping motor is installed on the lower guide rail of the bracket to control the movement of the crossbeam in the y-axis direction. The crossbeam is equipped with a pen holder and two stepping motors. The two stepping motors on the crossbeam control the pen holder in the x-axis direction. In order to ensure a higher accuracy, the two stepper motors are equipped with synchronous gears. The take-off and landing of pen holder are controlled by the steering gear sg90

Step 1: burn the grbl.hex firmware

Step 2: generate G code

Step 3: send G code to aduino through the upper computer of grbl

Step 4:Burn: use Arduino builder software to burn grbl.hex firmware, as shown in Figure.

Step 5:enerate G code: use Inkscape to generate G code, as shown in Figure

Step 6:Upper computer: grbl controller upper computer software, as shown in Figure

In this way, the rotation speed, stop position and rotation direction of the stepping motor are controlled so that the two-dimensional plotter can successfully draw the drawing.