A 3D Printed Polar Drawbot To Turn Modern Day Artists Into Michelangelo

For those who are unaware of the concept, Polar Drawbot is a special kind of robot used for drawing polargraph murals. These equipment are meant for teaching students about trigonometry, physics, programming, as well as electronics. However, Carlo Franciscone, a Novara based Italian engineer felt little artistic and restructured mechanical components of a wall-mounted Polar Drawbot to build something amazing that you would want to “take home” for any price.

As he likes to call it, this Makelangelo version of polargraph mural drawing robot is a piece of art that can hang itself vertically over the wall surface and carves out an image using steppers, software, motor mounts, and pen holder just like a 3D printer. The best part is he has prepared this software to accept BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, as well as DFX files for drawing images. Though he selected the firmware and electronics for this purpose from Makelangelo project, he preferred to use DK electronics motor shield to make his version of device.

The biggest challenge that he faced while designing this device was that none of the parts matched the requirement he had in mind. To sort this out, he had to design every single part right from the scratch and personalized every single thing as per his own taste. He watermarked all to let every know about the efforts he placed in this project. He further needed three distinct kind of pulleys, one for smooth cords and the other two for moving power via a synchronous transmission that he created through ball chains.

For this particular project, he employed 3.2mm 100 per cent metal chain along with a pitch of 4.4mm and 4mm plastic ball along with a cord with 6mm pitch, a cord of 12mm pitch and a plastic ball of 4.4mm. As per him, the chains used here can easily be used interchangeably, the diameters of the pulley needs to modified in order to keep away results that mess up final drawings’ aspect ratio. Franciscone also employed a “D” kind of battery and a holder he created to hold it.

He further explains that the source of inspiration for this project was a design by his fellow designer, Kongorilla.