Art Making Systems: Day 10

On day 10 we worked on finishing up the cartesian plotter and made our presentation. The Cartesian Plotter was easily the hardest and most annoying project throughout the two weeks of this course. On Tuesday the 29th of March we learned that our linear railing and bearings which we ordered on Amazon wouldn’t ship at all. So, we had to alter the design to the plotter and make our own railing design. This obviously lead to issues. We were short on supplies and we didn’t have much time to make this. We had to re-cut the pieces of wood that were holding our motors in order to screw them onto the railings. On Wednesday we made a lot of development and we were able to trigger the solenoid that held our sharpies to the paper or lifted it up when we needed to move the sharpie to a different position. We could manually program it using Universal G-Code Commands to draw two squares side by side. However, Thursday did not go according to plan.The wheels connected to the railing kept separating and we couldn’t even draw what we did on Wednesday. We had a couple of power shocks and burns with hot glue guns that left a couple of us visibly hurt. Friday we had a couple more breakthroughs on the cartesian plotter, and we finally got it to work. Sadly, we weren’t able to refine it enough to do any drawings outside of our test drawings.