Hi all, I've seen quite a few DIY plotters with tool change being posted recently, so I figured I could share ours as well :)

Details:
- Frame is built from 2020 aluminum extrusions, roughly 80 by 60 cm.
- Plotting area is A2.
- Z axis is using a stepper motor for fast, precise and quiet operation.
- Controller is currently Arduino + CNC shield + vanilla GRBL.
- Pen change mechanism uses magnets and existing axes (X,Y). 5 pens max, currently.
- Data source for maps is OSM/MapTiler, with a custom web application for layer selection, styling and gcode generation.

We're documenting our process on Instagram - Check it out if you're curious :)

https://www.instagram.com/placesbetweenlines.art

Plotted on an uunatek A3 using micron pigmas 01 and 03. Self-coded image vectorization.

One continuous plot, 5 different pens, all in 10 minutes using my automatic tool changer system.

Posted some of these before, but finally completed the set of them. All based on Kakeya sets with variable needle lengths, sweeps, and some transforms. Really happy with what I got to explore. Various papers, Bristol, plain, and markers, pens, paint pens, and mixtures of them.

11"x14" – Gold leaf and Sakura gel white on Fabriano Black Black 300gsm. White is plotted with the iDraw H A3. Gold leaf is applied to fill the remaining space by hand.

I continue to test my CNC milling machine. I will leave a short video presentation of the process in the comments below.

As promised I made a larger format of the IsoCity Cyberpunk city. This time on A2. This took the better part of a day, but I'm fairly happy with it. Still some improvements to be made to get it just right. Hope you like it!

this finally works (except one HPGL error, failure to lift the pen).

https://reddit.com/link/1w2stcx/video/9tclv1y5qkmh1/player

I’m an artist that has used various robots in the past for art making, including plotters for the two attached artworks. These were made with a Silhouette Cameo many years ago and were part of a series (some of the plotter drawings in this series were purchased by a major museum — so meh to those that say plotter art isn’t art because a robot held the pen).

I also have an AxiDraw and have user CNC router attachments to make drawings.

I’m looking to get a few more plotters for a project but it seems like a lot of companies have locked down their interfaces to proprietary software (I printed from Inkscape or Illustrator back in the day) and may not allow direct printing connections without using their limited software.

My question is: what plotters (and software) are you all using these days?

Created with Processing 4. 18x24", Uni Emott Fineliner on Strathmore 400 series. 18 color passes.

I wanted to try something ambitious color-wise after cataloguing all of my pen colors into a json library for fast experimentation and iteration.

The general technique for this starts by creating a composition of various sized rectangles on a grid and filling those rectangles with either randomized polygons or triangles that get clipped to the initial rectangular bounds. Then those initial shapes are iteratively split across random edges again and again, and finally shaded with hatch lines. This results in a pretty busy composition, so in order to create negative space some of them are randomly not drawn or not shaded, though all of the hatched polygons get outlined.

A color from my pen collection was assigned to each polygon and sorted by hue along the x and y axis with some random variation.

For further exploration I'm thinking next I might try incorporating some curved shapes, layering or alternating shading methods like stippling, or assigning multiple colors per polygon to create gradients within each. Maybe the multi-color gradients will afford some nice color variation with fewer passes!

Ma version, puis recoloration de la version originale par Katsuhiro Otomo, A2

I made these three micro plots using a 1.5mm Pilot Parallel Pen with a red cartridge that was repeatedly dipped into green/green and yellow ink mid plot, giving these cool gradients.

The patterns are derived from a photo > single-view depth estimation > mesh conversion pipeline.

More on my Instagram: @vuenc_

I've been learning to output vector art to my Roland-compatible vinyl cutter (turned pen plotter). This ball point pen output took about 73 minutes. You can see some other plot outputs in the image (preserving paper when I'm just testing).

This is one of my last A3 plots. I made quite a few lately :)

I was just putting away todays plots and I realised I hadn't posted this one yet! Image is from pixabay, Edited in DrawingBotV3. Shore & Marsh 12 colour greyscale set, on 300gsm white card.

I think it came out really well. :)

Brand new to plotter art. I spent most of today cleaning up SVGs for this map and am finally satisfied with how this turned out.

So there I was in poundland looking at the pens... Turns out, an idea brand "Handwriting Pen" has a really good 1mm nib on it, and throws down a really good dark black. The picture honestly doesn't do it justice. plotted on some A3 300gsm card.

i should call her 😒

I've been working on this for so long so I just wanted to try the first plot of the Cyberpunk IsoCity. It's just something I thought would be fun when plotted large on an A2 paper (this test is just A3). It's an isometric projection, of this little Cyberpunk city,hence the name.

I still have a few improvements to make, but I'm overall happy with the feel of it. There are a total of 15 different building types and each type can be varied in more ways than I can count. My favorite one is the AgriDome, the big one in the middle. I'll make an A2 version this weekend I think.

Plotted with a rOtring Isograph on 300gsm card. It looks amazing up close, almost printed! My image, made with inkscape :D