Plotter This plotter was a very successful proof of concept. The "platen" seen here moved left and right across a rack, driven by one motor and the ball-point pen was moved up and down by another. Both motors were mounted on the platen. The paper was fed through by a crude pinch-roller driven by a third motor, mounted on the base plate. The unit was controlled directly from a PC and could accept A5 paper. It can be seen here plotting our cat (input and output can be seen below), which took about 2 and a half hours!

This rear view gives a better idea how the pen was moved up and down. It was attached to a beam with PVC tape and the beam hoisted up and down by a motor. This unit was built before I invested in my angle sensors, so everything was time-based. There were switches at the ends of the platen racks to ensure that the extents were not over-run. I may have a go at a more accurate version with rotation sensors later this year. It would be really nice if the RCX had a method for querying the contents of it's DataLog; that way, I could dispense with the PC control by uploading the image to be plotted to the RCX before commencing.

Here is a ZIP file of the Visual Basic 4 program to plot a given monochrome BMP file on a piece of paper. The PC controls the plotter directly for this experiment, so no RCX code is required.

Here are some files which (in their Windows Bitmap (BMP) form) were used as test data. Please click on them to see the resultant plots. The first is my wife's name and the second is our cat, Jingle.

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