I love the idea of Drawbots!
What’s a Drawbot? It’s a little CNC machine used for drawing or painting. They’re typically 2D devices that are suspended on cables. If you’ve been to an amphitheater event any time recently that had a lot of video, you may have seen a video camera suspended on something similar. Here is a typical Drawbot:
In this case, the Drawbot hangs on the wall as a piece of kinetic art. It takes hours or days to finish a piece, but its always busy doing something, so is interesting to look at. Here’s a close up of the piece its working on:
There’s a fair amount of scoop on Drawbots over on the Makezine site. As I understand it, you can run a Drawbot with Mach3 by putting the correct math into the formulas for the axes. In this case, we have to simulate X and Y motions using the string droop.
I’ll have to try and make one some time. I’ve seen some set up for doing large commercial sign painting that seemed cool. Van murals, anyone?
Like what you read on CNCCookbook?
Join 100,000+ CNC'ers! Get our latest blog posts delivered straight to your email inbox once a week for free. Plus, we’ll give you access to some great CNC reference materials including:
- Our Big List of over 200 CNC Tips and Techniques
- Our Free GCode Programming Basics Course
- And more!
Just enter your name and email address below:
100% Privacy: We will never Spam you!
Bob is responsible for the development and implementation of the popular G-Wizard CNC Software. Bob is also the founder of CNCCookbook, the largest CNC-related blog on the Internet.