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Comment by LinuxAmbulance | Hacker News Reader

I always thought of plotters as legacy tech, but considering the variety of marking tools you can attach to the head, I'm wondering if I should get one.

Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?

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I made one for roughly $100 USD from an Arduino, steel rods, some stepper motors, and some 3D printed parts.

Having an existing 3d printer is a bit “draw the rest of the owl” for this, but being able to extend and modify a device like a pen plotter is pretty nice.

You can also pick up used older printers (like the Ender 3) secondhand VERY cheap and convert them.

But wouldn't you need to have the plotter working to draw the rest of that owl? so it seems like a chicken and egg situation as well

AxiDraw from Evil Mad Scientist was what a lot of us were buying a few years ago. He's now part of Bantam Tools and is making a thing called the NextDraw. Same design but better built and a lot more expensive. https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw

There's a world of cheaper unbranded Chinese plotters that folks are using that seem to work well. Quality does matter, you want something very precise and stable.

Looks like the Bantam Tools ones start at just under a thousand. How much were the AxiDraw units originally?

I think I paid a little over 700 for mine a few years back.

I paid $475 for an AxiDraw V3 (A4 size) in 2021. I'm not saying the new machines are bad value, they seem very nicely built. But it's definitely less of an impulse purchase at $1000.

Cricuts (and similar cutters, and multi-mode tools like the Xtool M1 and Bambu Lab H2D) have pen attachments

Yes. But no geek should be getting a Cricut when the Silhouette machines exist and are not so locked down and cloud encumbered.

ETA: I guess a true maths geek nerd artist would probably want something more modular and larger anyway, but the Silhouette machines are varied, interesting, support a pretty well documented protocol (GPGL, a variant of/alternative to HPGL I think) and are supported in Inkscape and Python.

Seconded. My Silhouette is great. I even emailed them and received a copy of the GPGL docs one time. It wasn't full on support, but they were willing to give me a start.

The first thing I programmed was having it draw a hilbert curve and it worked great!

Ooh, did you do a blog article about it perhaps? I think I read it, if so.

It's 14 years old at this point, but here you go: https://www.ohthehugemanatee.net/2011/07/gpgl-reference-cour...

Yep that’s the one. Thank you for it. :-)

I thought “evil mad science” had an inexpensive one. Including one the would pen plot on eggs. (Not available)

https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/171

And a 2d minimalist plotter.

https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846

They seem to have been bought. Those pro plotters look nice though quite pricy. The page still has good resources.

https://www.evilmadscientist.com/

The Bantam 'Next Draw' is what EMS used to sell. I bet it probably still uses the same board as the eggbot to drive it. Their new ones in a frame are cool, but one of the cool things with the nextdraw style is that you can plot on things that you can't fit in the frames.

I've used my axidraw to plot on floors and walls in the past.

A lot of people design and build their own custom pen plotters, with varying level of precision:

https://note.com/penplotter/n/n4fdf6959738a

The page is in Japanese, but you can get a feel of things through the embedded videos. One of them links to this instructables page in English:

https://www.instructables.com/Mini-Plotter-V2/

You could find a Silhouette Portrait 2 on eBay pretty cheaply. It has a reasonable range of tools, python and inkscape support and a reasonable, documented protocol.

As a side note, I bought an Aliexpress $25 'hanging arduino plotter' - I was never able to get good results from it sadly - though I felt a learnt a lot from it and scratched the plotter itch that I had.

I'd also be very interested in a 'good' cheapish plotter - to try a few things that I was never able to with the extra low quality one that I bought

A typical filament 3d printer is just a pen plotter with a fancy toolhead and an extra fancy 'pen up'. ( I explained to a friend once that a pen plotter is doom (2.5d) and a 3d printer is quake). Hell a laser cutter is just a pen plotter with a pen you turn off instead of lifting.

Doesn't seem so 'legacy' to me.

We've got a couple at the engineering/automation company I work for. They're huge, probably 8 feet long at least. No idea what they were used for - they belonged to the engineering group. Unfortunately I can't ask because they all quit.

Large-scale stuff like blueprints is the obvious explanation, but the largest plotter I've ever personally seen was owned by an oil exploration company and used to graph their seismic test results. Only about 5 feet wide (just over 1.5 m), though.

Not legacy at all. Think construction/cabinetry plans etc. Plotters are not inexpensive unless you build one.

The LY Drawbot on Aliexpress is around $110 USD and it's quite good.

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