Bottle Plotter | Hacker News Reader

Bottle Plotter

vgnotepad.blogspot.com

285 pointspicdit24 comments

The end result is much cooler looking than I was expecting, and will be even more so with multiple colors.

For people who want labels for homemade bottled products, and who don’t want to make or buy a plotter, milk labels are pretty great. You print on plain paper (important: with a laser printer), cut to shape, dip in a shallow pan of milk, apply the paper to the bottle and ease out any wrinkles, then press gently on it with a paper towel.

When it dries, it stays on really well (unless it gets wet), and it comes off super easily for reusing the bottle (just get it wet).

Edit: I'm no artist, but chatgpt is good enough for generating images for a couple labels for bottles to bring to a friend's house: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-23T21-51-59.om16cg7cwmuo244... and https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-23T21-51-23.4w510xksghqiamx...

I have been in the hell of labels for bottles/jars for a few years now. Never needing enough to send off for professional printing with their minimum order sizes, but more than enough that I've tried several label vendors and purchased laser printed dedicated for purpose. For my needs, none have proven worthy of anything more than "bring to a friend's house" or taking some pictures to look like you're doing something. I absolutely hate this aspect of the chosen side hustle. Not sure this would be the solution for me either, as it would just be too slow. Labels are just so much faster for quantity. If you're not doing quantity, would the expense of something like this make sense?

I would suggest looking in to a manual pad printer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDj-9qEAPc0

Interesting idea to use milk. Although I might be inclined to use heavily water diluted PVA.

My father have used PVA for homemade wine for decades. Works fine.

Hi All, author here. I'm little bit surprised to find my blog here. If you have any question feel free to ask!

Nice project! You state that your looking for someone to opensource it. Whats keeping you from just gitlab pushing your stuff? :) Would possibly be interested in recreating this.

Time, I would like to polish all the stuff a do it properly, but have not time for that. Also there are still some things TBD.

Open source happens sometimes because people are willing to just git push things that are half finished or even garbage. You should not feel bad about doing it!

Until all the requests for help start coming in..

In my experience you have to be very successful to get anyone to pay attention at all.

"Again looking on the final machine everything looks as very obvious solution."

It's probably only obvious after you done the other versions first. I know because I feel the same way about most of my projects. After enough of those things you get closer to a final in fewer iterations, but never have I done it on the first try for anything meant to last longer than the first use

There are existing similar-ish products, for doing things like engraving drinking glasses, lasering barcodes onto cylindrical products, customising travel coffee mugs and things like that. For cheap marking lasers this is called a 'laser engraving roller' and for big CNC mills it'll be called something like a '4th axis' or '5th axis'.

This is a super neat and cool project, but someone who knows a bit about CNC control - as the author surely does - will have sources of inspiration to draw upon, and won't have to solve every problem from scratch.

Great project! It could be the bigger brother of the egg bot: https://egg-bot.com/

Glad to see the author ended up with something that works well. A quick search for "plotter rotary axis" yields several similar projects with a few different approaches, which is interesting.

That final design (on the bottle) is excellent

We have one of those rotary jigs for our 60W Laser Cutter/Engraver. We tried to do basically the same by engraving glass bottle for a project.

Damn, the dialing-in process was... energetic.

There is existing hardware for this https://www.foxalien.com/en-de/products/foxalien-laser-rotar...

Good for laser engravers, but rotating a bottle painted with gold felt tip marker will make some mess on bottle and rollers. Some markers will have too much drag and bottle will not rotate leading to lost steps.

Oooh I see map projections. Could the plotter be coded to handle bottles of different contours?

I could easily imagine a CMM-style contact probe to scan-in arbitrary shaped bottles, then allow the user to experiment with different projections in software before committing to the final plot.

Such capability is pretty common in the CNC world to account for the flatness (or lack thereof) of a work piece.

This is awesome! Love that it is able to "plot" across a cylinder

neat. might combine this with a bottle cutter to use them as planters for plants

like these https://www.instagram.com/bottles.delight/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com