[Terje Io] decided to breathe new life into an old pen plotter — the CX6000 from C. Itoh, a Japanese business that made a number of printers for Apple in the 1980s. He keeps most of the framework, however the electronics get a major overhaul. The old motors are replaced, the controller as well as motor drivers are modernized utilizing a Raspberry Pi Pico as well as stepper motor drivers. After tending to other auxiliary electronics like the manage panel as well as limit switches, it’s time to offer with the firmware.
Original Controller Board
Updated Controller Board
Rather than reinvent the wheel, [Terje] sensibly developed upon existing jobs as well as refactored them for his application. G-Code processing is done by grblHAL, with an added mode to handle HPGL code. He customized the firmware from Motöri the Plotter project to parse HPGL, making his new CX6000+ bilingual.
We covered Motöri method back in 2009, as well as more just recently we composed about the Teensy Controller utilizing grblHAL, one of the 32-bit huge siblings of GRBL. have you ever brought back one of these old plotters? Or is it easier to just develop your own these days?