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MAKE Flickr pool member atduskgreg has been working on a drawing machine using parts scrounged from old cd drives.
It's actually a drawing machine. It's built from two stepper motors I salvaged from come old CD-ROM drives. In its current incarnation, it has two pots each of which controls the movement of one of the two motors: for moving the pen up and down or left and right.
It's great seeing students' progress as they reach milestones on their projects. If you are a student or teacher and want to show off your classroom breakthroughs, pass them along in the comments or Make Flickr pool.
Greg has parked some of the code used for the project online and has written about it on his blog. You can check out a bunch of photos of the build and products in his Flickr set for the project.
With Tom Igoe's help, I figured out how the connections to the steppers worked. They are both bipolar steppers so they have four connections each. I measured the continuity to find which pairs of leads were connected to each magnet. Once I had this right, I plugged each of them into an h-bridge and then connected the h-bridge's four inputs to the arduino and told the Stepper library about them.
In the Maker Shed:
