While I am home for the holidays I decided to work on a project that was small in scale
but fun nevertheless.
I’m going to use my Ender 3 3D printer a 2D pen plotter.
So, drawing on paper with a 3D printer.
I’ll use one of these 0.3 millimeter felt tip pens as the tool for drawing.
I took a loose measurement of the pen’s width for later.
I found a printable attachment for the Ender 3 that would allow me to modify the parameters
for my pen.
The link to this model will be in the description.
I used the included OpenSCAD file to set the tool diameter to 10 millimeters.
Next, I printed the attachment.
After some melting and messing up, I got a captive nut and an m3 screw to hold the pen
in place
I used a piece of electrical tape and a strategically placed zip tie to hold the attachment to the
tool head of the printer.
The pen was a little too lose so I just stuck a pen cap next to the pen as a shim for now.
Now I had to see at what Z height the the pen tip was from the bed as well as what X
and Y position it was offset from the normal extruder print head.
This means that when I want to draw something, I need the the height of the extruder to be
11 millimeters higher than normal.
In the Cura slicing software, I changed my machine settings to turn off the heated bed.
I changed my nozzle size to 0.3 millimeters, the same size as my pen.
I did the same for the wall thickness.
I set my wall line count to 2 as I prefer the thicker outline.
In order for the lines to say on one level, set the top to bottom thickness at 0 millimeters.
I chose a 60 percent lines infill which depending on the size of the graphic will fill in the
black areas.
The extruder will not heat up when I set the material temperatures to zero.
I enabled the retraction setting so that Z-hop could be enabled.
The Z-offset setting is not a part of Cura by default.
I had to install a plugin from the marketplace called, z-offset setting.
I then set it to 11 millimeters.
I imported an STL file that I converted from an SVG of the Hackbatch logo.
I will leave a link to the online tool I used to do this below.
I used the offsets I measured earlier to shift the print so that it was aligned with where
the pen would actually draw it in the center of the page.
The final step is to scale the print so that it is only one layer.
I did this by turning off uniform scaling and adjusting the z scale until I could slice
the model and get an estimated print time.
If I could not get a print preview an estimated time, the print would fail in my testing.
While it took a little bit of moving things around to get the results I wanted, it only
took about three tries to get something that looks this cool.
I’m very happy with how such a simple hack turned out.
I am looking forward to doing more plotter projects with this in the future.
Thanks for watching everyone.
stay tuned to Hackbtach.com for more projects like this!