CNC Airbrush

[Bastiaan]

Hi Guys,

I'm new here on the CNCzone forums but I've been browsing for quite some time now, watching all the wonderful projects going on here.

I'm currently working on a large vertical airbrush bot for a public art installation project. Below are some visuals of my work so far.



movie:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/674010/CNCbrush.m4v
(just drawing some random line patterns here, nothing too interesting, a little test)

Basically, what's going on:

• Hardware:
• aluminium, free standing frame, 1.5 x 3m (but easily expandable, a quite modular design).
• 2 stepper motors (1Nm, bipolar) to control movement using timing belts.
• closed loop timing belt controls X-axis, Y-axis uses counter weights to overcome gravity.
• standard cheap airbrush controlled by hobby servo, just on/off control for now.
  Electronics:
• two l297 + l298 pairs control steppers, powered by salvaged PC power supply.
• controlled by 2 Arduino uC boards at the moment(one for steppers, one for servo).
  Software:
• Can run stand-along with some custom code (no Gcode yet) or attached to PC using some simple custom serial commands. So far, I've been drawing using a wii-mote and some webcam input, which is fun.

I'm currently working on controlling it using EMC2, which seems like the best free/open source solution. But I'm open to suggestions Ideally, I would like it to show up as a standard printer driver in Illustrator like some laser cutters do but that may be a bit far off for now. I'm also looking into somehow using inkscape with some plugin to generate the right signals.

As you can see in the movie, the stepper for the Y-axis control (up/down) isn't quite strong enough to overcome the friction in the system. A new, stronger(2.5Nm) motor should be arriving any day now.

I've found some old posts by people working on similar projects but I'n not sure if any of those were ever finished, old links tend to die. Of course I'm familiar with the Hektor project which was one of my inspirations for this build, trying to take the idea into a different direction.

For now, I'm open to any suggestion and just interested in seeing what you guys think, I'd love to hear some comments / tips!

[BobWarfield]

That's really cool!

I've seen some CNC air brushes here and there and always been curious about them.

Cheers,

BW

[tomfish]

This is awsome! A really good way to get people interested in machines...

I like the idea of the printer driver, but I'm no programmer...
I'm sure you've seen it already, but there's a page on the emc wiki about generating simple gcode from vector drawings:
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emc...?InkscapeHowto

It's a really nice idea to do as a public art installation. You could get people to draw their own shapes in inkscape, then let them watch as you turn them into g-code and run them... 10 mins drying and they can take the rolled up plots home to spread the word!

I'm all for it - keep going!