sol-hackweek-fall-2022

Wall Plotter Robot for Visual Debugging of the Unity Editor

Step 1: Build Robot

The robot is made using scraps left over from a recent house move and old bits of hobby projects found in a drawer:

• Arduino Uno R3
• 2 x 28BYJ-48 Stepper Motors
• 2 x ULN2003A Unipolar Driver Boards
• Old wire
• Old Network Cable
• Old 5V power supply (phone charger)
• 2 x Cup hooks on shelf blocks
• A piece of old MDF (also used for the pulleys)
• Old kitchen cupboard door as a whiteboard (had no pens though)
• Ikea cardboard boxes and bits of metal that should hold some cabinets to the wall (whoops)
• Sharpie Marker

Step 2: Write the stepper motor code

This was the bit that took the longest, as the Arduino Uno is a rather slow board, but using a fantastic resource from ScienceDirect and a sketch from iForce2D for stepper motor synchronisation I got it all to work!

Step 3: Reverse engineer coordinates from line art and the Unity Logo

This was mind numbing, and I did resort to using Excel (booooooooo) but it worked fine.

Step 4: Next phases

Due to having several projects on currently, I was not able to spend the Hackweek just on hacking, as such what you see in this video is the result of 2-ish days of fun. Next steps are:

1. Write a WebServer for my Raspberry Pi 3b
   1. Ingest an image sent from the Unity Editor Scene or Game Window
   2. Convert this to line art
   3. Calculate G-code to draw image
2. Update Arduino to receive G-code over serial port
3. Make the pen plotter automatically lift
4. Network it!!!