FreeCAD News

Pen plot­ters are cool and there are plen­ty of open designs to choose from. What if we want to exper­i­ment beyond pens? Well then per­haps brush­es and paint are fun to play with! The open­Brusho­graph is exact­ly this, an XYZ style pen plot­ter with addi­tion­al paint dish­es and some pret­ty cool design and con­trol sys­tems to allow for mul­ti colour painting. 

The hard­ware design is built around 3D print­ing and the very afford­able 28BYJ48 style step­per motors. Inter­est­ing­ly the CAD design is FreeCAD for the XY assem­bly com­po­nents and Open­SCAD for the Z axis assem­bly. It’s pos­si­bly due to the Z axis being based on an ear­li­er design, but, what­ev­er the rea­son, it’s great that FreeCAD and Open­SCAD offer the solu­tions need­ed for projects like this. 

What’s real­ly impres­sive about open­Brusho­graph is the amount of doc­u­men­ta­tion not only for the build process, includ­ing set­ting up GRBL or Flu­id NC parts of the build, but also lot’s of guides about how to cre­ate mul­ti coloured lay­ered designs using Inkscape. There’s also lots of infor­ma­tion on how to gen­er­ate g‑codes which have some added com­plex­i­ty due to the “trav­el to paint dish” aspects of the process. There’s even a web based G‑Code gen­er­a­tor that can receive mul­ti­ple SVG lay­er files and com­bine them into a G‑Code doc­u­ment to run via Uni­ver­sal G‑Code Sender (UGS).

Over on this fab­u­lous wiki you’ll find not only all this infor­ma­tion, but also lot’s of details of events and work­shops that open­Brusho­graph have run. It looks like they are cre­at­ing a vibrant com­mu­ni­ty. Excel­lent work.