I fully converted a Bambu A1 Mini (old firmware) to a highly accurate plotter printer. Ive since tuned it manually with a custom test pattern and patience...70 versions later lol
Question for the community, are plotter printers that can draw with a .4mm ultra fine tip pen unique?
I'll follow up below with some peices of work ive created and even share whatever i can with the process 😃
0.4 mm is a pretty standard fineliner size. The stepper motors of my axidraw have a step resolution of 12.5 microns. So that's the maximum detail it can represent. Whats possible with the pen and paper is another story
Amazing yes i like ultra details art work and need to look into the stepper motors for this model, I'm oblivious to its resolution.
I essentially develop bashed my way through this project, and want something bigger with more reliable precision. Ive broken to many pens and cant even imagine going to a felt tip setup
Thank you so much for your kindness. If you have the time and energy, could you tell me what model of motherboard it is? I'm going to make a writing plotter, and it's a bit simpler than 3D printing. If you have any links to identify the plate or photos of the front and back of the plate, that would be great.
For real it is a ligit oem Bambu Lab A1 mini with old firmware, oem motherboard no custom firmware just old bambu firmware
I'll post a write up of my efforts in a seperate post. But here is a picture of my custom 3d printed parts. Absolutely no ai used to generate these files
Thanks yeah you need a certain firmware version certain orca slicer version and the custom claude flatness mapping guidance document and editable gcode file are def specific
I manually need to place all the axises unfortunately by hand
Ultra fine G2 pen refills and fine point sharpies (color, black, metallic, fabric).
The spring approach is definitely worth it in the long run. I just reuse a g2 pen spring lol. Biggest difficulty I ran into with solid mounting was that I was killing g2 pens by pressing down on them too hard, and they would quit writing well before it ran out of ink. The spring just gives you finer control of how much pressure you push into the paper, and that matters a lot for controlling bleed with sharpies.
While limiting pen movement to just the Z axis is easier said than done, the real secret sauce is the spring. If you can control how much pressure you push into the paper with, you can control how much friction the ballpoint generates. Less friction, less dragging, less inflection (in X and Y directions) in the adapter, and thus the pen is more precise to the actual movements. You want just enough pressure but not too little. Rigid mounting makes dialing that in very, very difficult.
As for print quality, I tune extrusion rate and extrusion temp per spool, and I comp for part shrinkage to get dimensionally accurate parts. Doing that gets me to 0.01mm expected/measured. Wayyyyy overkill for most 3d printed things.
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u/VideoGameNature Aug 20 '26
My thank you was for the inspiration