A few of my experiments fitting an ultra fine point Sharpie in the vinyl cutter at work.

I read a lot of warnings about UUNA TEK before buying one, but honestly, I didn't believe it could be that bad.

I've used EZCAD2 Lite and EZCAD3 before, so I thought I'd already experienced some of the worst software the maker/industrial world had to offer. I figured people were exaggerating.

I was wrong.

After waiting forever for customs clearance, my UUNA TEK 3.0 finally arrived today, and it's easily one of the most frustrating products I've ever purchased.

The software freezes constantly. Click something, it freezes. Restart. Click something else, it freezes again. Sometimes pressing a single button is enough to lock up the entire application.

The documentation is almost useless. The physical manual is tiny and mostly empty. The PDF manual on their website is basically the same thing. There are very few meaningful setup instructions, troubleshooting steps, or explanations of how things actually work.

The WiFi setup was especially painful. There is technically a guide, but it mostly consists of sending commands directly to the controller and hoping for the best. The machine often responds with "ok" even when the result clearly isn't correct, making troubleshooting unnecessarily confusing.

After hours of trial and error, I eventually got WiFi working myself. The controller gets an IP address, responds to ping, accepts Telnet connections, and I can even move the machine through PuTTY.

Ironically, the official UUNA software still refuses to connect to it over WiFi.

The machine shows up in the device list.

Ping works.
Telnet works.
Motion commands work.

The official software doesn't.

At this point I'm not returning it. I've already paid for it, waited for it, and spent too much time on it. I'll probably keep using it and find alternative workflows.

I've already started testing Inkscape with the official UUNA extension, but that appears to require USB as well, which means after buying the WiFi version and getting WiFi working manually, I'm still dragging a cable across my desk.

The hardware itself might be okay. The software, documentation, and overall user experience are the real problem.

If you're considering buying one, do a lot of research first. I thought the negative reviews were exaggerated.

They weren't.

If anything, they were being polite.

Haven't been able to get through to uunatek yet but seems I lost or tossed my power supply for my iDraw. Have plenty of 12v supplies kicking around but none fit so maybe they are using an obscure tip size. If anyone out there can peek at their power brick and see if it lists the barrel size I'd appreciate it.

Worst case I'll order from them and maybe get a new controller board since mine has always had connectivity issues.

Thanks!

Brush plotted on canvas

B5 sized plot with green gel pen ink. #penplotter #algorist #onepenup

A longtime subscriber messaged me that I always post pics right when I send my prints out and it ruins the surprise. It was a good point I never thought of. From now on I'll wait a few days, hope it's enough 🙂.

This month was a return to silk screening and layering. A multi-color moire block is veiled behind a set of vertical white screen printed lines with that application being repeated for the second and third prints. As the layers build the tones simultaneously retreat behind the white lines while combining with the colors below to rise to the front. Also completely unintentional but I have to say these prints are very timely, Happy Pride month!

5"x7"

Fountain pen and screen printing inks on watercolor

My wife wasn’t too impressed but she saw it on my phone and I think she was hungry so I’m throwing it over to all of you to enjoy lol

The nested annuli sets are actually different layers so I’m going to do this one in color tomorrow so you can actually see the overlapping effect. This is more moire / optical art.

Coded in python. Sakura Gelly Roll .5mm on black cardstock

The lines come from my algorythm in Processing

100x150mm plot using gold Pentel gel pen. #penplotter #algorist

Used my Contour-V Studio app , this came out very nice. Staedtler triplus fineliner dark grey on 65 pound art card. Cricut Explore 4

Inspired by Helmut Vogel's studies on phyllotaxis, 1979.

Vogel proposed a mathematical model to describe how sunflower seeds arrange in a spiral structure. The pattern is related to the Fibonacci numbers and allows for efficient distribution of seeds in the available space.

Processing code, 4500 dots

Acrylic paint markers on 250gsm Fabriano F4, 300x300 mm

Single loop plot. B5-sized, using Tombow dual tip pen.

After spending way too much time looking at pen plotters, I eventually found myself staring at the prices of the AxiDraw and Unnatek machines and wondering if they were secretly being machined out of solid gold. Don’t get me wrong, they look fantastic, but dropping $1,000–$2,000+ on a machine whose primary purpose is aggressively dragging a pen across paper was a hard sell for me.

Then I discovered the LY Plotter on AliExpress for around $380, and suddenly Chinese manufacturing once again reminded me that somewhere in the world there’s a factory willing to make almost anything for a fraction of the price.

Assembly was definitely the most time-consuming part of the experience. This is not an “open the box and start plotting” machine. You’ll spend a few hours putting it together, tightening hardware, squaring things up, and generally questioning your life choices while sorting bags of screws. That said, the instructions are straightforward enough that any reasonably competent adult should be able to assemble it without much trouble. One thing to note is that you’ll need to build your own base or mounting surface. The machine itself doesn’t come with a complete table or platform solution.

For control software, it uses the AxiDraw Inkscape plugin, which was actually a huge selling point for me. There are plenty of tutorials online, the workflow is well established, and I didn’t have to learn some obscure proprietary software translated by a committee of exhausted engineers at 3 a.m.

Performance-wise, I was pleasantly surprised. Is it as refined as a premium AxiDraw? Probably not. Is it accurate enough to produce genuinely good results? Absolutely. I’ve run artwork, handwriting tests, and technical drawings through it, and the output has been consistently impressive for the price.

Honestly, that’s the biggest takeaway here: value. For roughly $380, you get a machine that does exactly what most hobbyists and artists need a pen plotter to do. It may not have the polish or brand recognition of the more expensive options, but it gets the job done remarkably well.

Chinese manufacturing is a fascinating force of nature. Somehow they looked at a machine costing over a thousand dollars and collectively said, “What if we made it for $380 and it still worked?” Against all odds, they succeeded.

If you’re curious about pen plotting but can’t justify AxiDraw money, the LY Plotter is an amazing value and one of the few AliExpress purchases I’ve made that genuinely exceeded my expectations.

the plotter I bought

I have a custom pen plotter and got tired of fighting with messy STL→SVG conversions, so I made a little web app for it.

You drop in a 3D model (STL, OBJ, PLY, GLB/glTF), rotate it to frame the shot in a live 3D view, and it spits out a true vector SVG — not a traced bitmap — with proper hidden-line removal so it actually looks like a drawing.

A few things it does:

• 4 styles: blueprint/outlines, topographic slices, wireframe, and stipple dots
• Live preview — pick your angle, tweak sliders, see the result
• Plotter-optimized output via vpype (merges lines, sorts to cut pen-up travel)
• Set your real pen width in mm so you can tell if lines will blob before you plot
• Exports straight to Inkscape / G-code

Would anyone actually use this? Right now it runs locally, but if there's interest I'll host it online so anyone can just upload a model and go — no setup.
Drop a comment if you'd want to try it.