An intro to Pen Plotters

Re:An intro to Pen Plotters by cronjobma on Thursday March 01, 2018 @04:08PM (#16496350)

This is absolutely fascinating. It got me all excited about pen plotters and I’m thinking of ordering to hack around with it. Would love to try attaching water pencils to it for example. How about hacking 10 of these to move a long a real person’s hand so you can sign multiple pages. This one article is going to hijack so many of my upcoming weekends...

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Re:An intro to Pen Plotters by Kadin on Friday March 02, 2018 @02:00AM (#16499677)

> hacking 10 of these to move a long a real person’s hand so you can sign multiple pages

You may already be familiar with this, but the "Autopen" is a commercial device descended from older machines which did exactly that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen

I'm not sure how current ones work exactly, but the 1940s through 1960s ones used a system of cams running against a template. It's more complex than just the 2D motion of a pen plotter, as I believe it can also alter the pen angle and pressure somewhat.

It descends from older devices which go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who used various mechanical aids to make simultaneous multiple copies of handwritten documents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph_(duplicating_device)

They are quite clever, although today largely forgotten outside of their historical connections.

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Re:An intro to Pen Plotters by dsnuh on Thursday March 01, 2018 @07:05PM (#16497596)

If you order a kit, pay a bit more to get one with instructions! The quality of the kits seems pretty hit and miss. I would go with a branded AxiDraw instead of a clone if I had it to do again.

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