Maker

Drawbot Love

How a bunch of us made our own drawing robot. By Bre Pettis

WHEN I FIRST READ ABOUT DOUGLAS My friend 3ric held a robot-making get-together at McDonald’s Scribbler Bot (MAKE, Volume Seattle’s Public N3rd Area, and friends were recruited 07, page 141), it was love at first sight. to help. Fueled by undocumented quantities of I simply had to make a drawing robot. pizza and Mountain Dew, contributors 3ric, Adam,

Doug’s original Scribbler Bot converted webcam Melvin, Brian, Divide, John, and Choong brought photos into distinctive line drawings, then used a their ninja-level hardware-hacking and software-homemade plotter (with a pen or pencil zip-tied on) writing talents to the project. to render them onto poster-size paper. I knew from On the hardware side, we hooked up the step-his article that to put something like this together pers and the limit switches to the MAKE Controller, myself, I needed to get some stepper motors and and we put together DB9-connected serial cables boss them around with some software. Luckily, I with different-colored wires so they would be easy got a lot of the hardware issues out of the way by to follow if there was a problem. I found that when finding a Japanese medical contraption that had running lots of wires, it helps to twist them all up a former life organizing vials of blood. It was a into a cable with a drill, and when attaching them perfect XYZ platform for my drawbot! to things, zip ties are your friend.

I quickly realized that I couldn’t do this project Throughout the build, it was important to keep on my own. The hardware required reverse- a notebook with all of our diagrams and notes. engineering, and the software had to be coded. The stepper motors required more power than the

Photography and portraits by Bre Pettis

36 Make: Volume 11