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Pretty much the only way to get a hold of these in South America is to either buy a cricut (or similar proprietary solution) or buy a Chinese one.

I wish these were a bit more popular! I think drawing bots will never be as useful or popular as 3d printers so we might be stuck with poor solutions or building our own. The axidraw software is open source but I'm not sure there's been a whole lot of effort into adapting it to open hardware solutions. Though there's a project on thingverse that seems compatible.




Is a 3D printer closer to a drawing machine or a conventional printer. I think of printers as working on pixels (maybe I’m wrong about this) while drawing machines and 3D printers have lines as their primitives, right? Maybe 3D printers could become drawing machine, haha. 3D to 2D drawing machine project: project on a plane.


I look at a 3D printer as an additive counterpart to a CNC machine. I think the lack of a z-axis is what separates drawing machines.


> Is a 3D printer closer to a drawing machine or a conventional printer?

I believe so. The ancient Greeks would scale up a sculpture using a cage placed around it. XYZ coordinates would br drawn from this using measuring sticks. This is, effectively, an analog version of our 3D printers and also an. Extra dimentional version of a drawing machine.


Drawing machine, its a popular small project to print a pen adapter and use them to draw


I bought an Axidraw a while back (and love it!) but having seen a lot of the homegrown ones I feel like it's a relatively lower-level project assuming you're good with working with steppers and motors.

I've seen wall-sized vertical ones that work with a microcontroller, some threads and a few servers.


The era of drawing machines already came and went, and it wasn't 3D printers that killed them.




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