“In this tutorial I will show you how I built a CNC pen plotter or a drawing machine but with one cool feature and that’s automatic tool change. In other words, the machine will be able to automatically change colors and so we can draw really cool stuff with it.
Overview
The construction of the machine is based on my DIY CNC Laser Engraver machine from my previous video where the goal was to make the simplest CNC machine with minimum parts possible. It uses 3 NEMA 17 stepper motors for the X, Y and the Z axis motion, and a small servo for the gripper. The brain of this CNC Pen plotter machine is an Arduino UNO board in combination with a CNC shield and three A4988 stepper drivers.
The work area of fairly big, 360x280mm, and the level of details this pen plotter can output is in my opinion quite impressive too. I was actually surprised how good and precise the drawings came out, especially the ones where I used a 0.6mm gel pen.
Nevertheless, now I will explain everything you need to know about building a drawing machine like this, including how to design it, connect the electronics, what firmware and software to use and how to generate G-code for it.”