Weekly Progress

Week of 2/17/2020

• Designed the laser cut parts in CorelDraw vector graphics software

• Cut out main frame of the printer with a laser cutter

• Assembled main frame of the printer

• Wrote image processing script in Matlab to reduce an image into only black and white pixels which will allow our machine to print it with one marker color

Designing Laser Cut Parts:

Assembling the Laser Cut Parts:

Example Image Processing:

Week of 2/24/2020

• Ordered parts:

  • • • • 3 stepper motors to drive 2 axis movement

        • 3 stepper motor driver boards

        • 12v power supply

        • Solenoid linear actuator to move pen on and off paper

        • Ultra fine felt tip pens

        • Skateboard bearings

• Wrote code to drive stepper motors using the power supply and driver boards

Week of 3/2/2020

• Mounted motors to move our axis system

• Attached pulley belts to the motors and frame

Week of 3/9/2020

• Built a pen mount on the solenoid with steal wire

• Mounted the solenoid and pen onto the main track

• Built circuit to drive solenoid with the STM32 board, a BJT transistor, and a relay

• Cleaned up wiring on motor driver circuit

• Wrote code that read image data to control the solenoid

• We ran into fixed positioning issues when starting a new row so we added a push button to notify the board when we reached the left side

• We began testing the drawing capabilities with a procedurally generated checkerboard pattern

• Started testing drawing capabilities with our processed image data