Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
A4-sized pen plotter
pixelsafoison:
Hello there :),
I'm here to ask a few questions regarding the feasibility of an idea of mine, I can handle the hardware-side of things but I do need some advice regarding software.
To put it bluntly, i'm too poor to buy ink cartridges, they cost me around 100€ a month and that's only to print text. I'm an engineering student and while having everything at hand on onenote is great, it still isn't the same as paper.
Which is why I have started getting funny ideas about making my own A4-sized pen plotter... It's not THAT hard to design, sure I'll have a few fuck-ups but I'm pretty confident that I can design my own without too much trouble.
The only thing remaining is the software... and ... Yeah ... while I hate to be like "pfeh, there's no software for it" while I'm contributing jack shit to fixing the issue is a behaviour I despise, I cannot seem to find any software aside from inkscape that can translate images/text to Gcode.
If any one of you has any info on a good way to easily turn PDF/A4-PNGs to Gcode (= turn them into vectors and then translate) I'd be VERY grateful ...
Many thanks in advance!
PS: thanks for being such a f*cking awesome community!
TeddyPython:
Taking a look at your problem that inspired this (ink costing too much at EUR100 per month), I would say that this would not be suitable and would waste time and money.
How much do you print per month in terms of pages? Could this be done in black and white? EUR100 is about £90, which would buy me 3 XL cartridges of 'high yield' black ink from HP. That's a lot of printing.
In fact, with £90, you could buy nearly _four_ entirely new printers each month, such as the HP Deskjet 2622, which prints in colour and comes with ink.
One thing to consider also, is why we almost never see pen plotters anywhere at all. The inkjet is much faster, convenient and cheaper (because of economies of scale). I think you might want to consider the options above if the purpose of this is to save money, as the project would only return useful results after a lot of effort, time and money. Even then, the quality will unlikely be anywhere close to what the £25 printer (with ink!) would produce.
My 1 cents.
ataradov:
Designing and building anything you can readily buy to save money is the worst idea ever. It never ever makes financial sense. The amount of money you will spend on materials and R&D will be way more than just buying new printers when the old run out of ink.
And yes, if you only print B&W, then get a laser printer. Their cartridges last forever.
jhpadjustable:
Welcome!
A pen-plotting system sounds a bit Rube Goldberg. There are more direct means to lower the consumables cost of printing. One is the refill kit. Another is the continuous ink retrofit. Yet another is to skip ink entirely and use a laser printer, where refill kits are generally pretty cheap.
golden_labels:
pixelsafoison:
Ink is a terrible idea for black&white text. For that purpose ink printers offer no advantage over other types, and they are always sucking your wallet hard. In particular “cheap” home printers, for which the business model is delivering a device — often at close to no profit to the manufacturer — and then earning on ink cartridges.
Buy yourself a used (but not too old(1)) small office laser printer, using toner cartridge price/page as the guide in your selection. Those can be bought for 100–150€ and then you get 1000–5000k pages worth of toner for 20–60€.
OTOH building a working and reliable plotter may be an interesting hobby project. But do it for fun, not for money saving. It will cost you a lot, having vibrations low enough to get even nice 75DPI will be hard, and it will be tremendously slow: at 1 character/s you will need 40 minutes to print a page.
____
(1) An old one will still work, but expect you will have to replace some parts. In long term this will still be cheaper than ink, but short-term it will require more money and your printer will learn a lot of foul language if it breaks a night before you actually need those things printed. ;)
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