What everyone has always wanted... a machine to paint smiley faces.

Our machine reads (code) at a first grade level. You can kind of tell what it is trying to do, but it's pretty sloppy. Many things need changing, but it is just fine tuning. Each drawing should get successively better from here on. 

What we told it to paint.

What it painted.

and finally, the setup.

Go go gadget CNC AIRBRUSH!

Trying out one of the more exciting of all the possible z-axis mounts.

Soon we will attach this to the rest of the machine and have some

real fun.

All 3 axes working (mostly)

You fix a problem... you find a problem. This seems to be the

way this whole project has gone. All three axes work, but now

we can see that the x axis is skipping steps and the y axis is

snagging, causing it to jump.

Along with the list of things to do is create a rig that can hold

an airbrush so that we can spray paint on any surface.

Z-axis control

Using an 8 foot brake cable line from Sunflower Outdoor as a remotely located motor control, testing its ability to maintain strength through bends and in directional transfers. This may be the last piece towards full functionality. Now we can simply build several 'media heads' that attach to the y-sled and each are dedicated to a specific media type ie airbrush, dry erase marker, chalk, etc.

Technically, Nick opened this fortune cookie, but I was with him at the time so I will assume that the "You" referred to here is plural.

Work Continues

The machine gets better every time we work on it. A small tweak here and there, making sure nothing will break later on. Most the work recently has been moving the Z axis motor from the Y axis sled to the X axis sled (I think Nick and I have developed our own language to describe the project). The good news is that two potential clients have proposed projects for our machine. We will see where those lead too.....

A "Dry" Run (dry erase)

With the X and Y axes mostly completed, it was time for our first test. The Z axis that controls the moving of the pen off the board was not yet installed. Hopefully we will have that running soon. There is also a large amount of fine tuning to be done, but this big step keeps us motivated.