Backstory
I got an Arduino board for my birthday last year, and after it had been lying around for a while I figured it was about time to do something useful with it before it gathered dust completely. Browsing around on youtube some time ago, I came across a few videos about latte art. That gave me the idea of building a robot that can print, or rather plot, pictures onto the foam of a latte. In this series of articles I’ll try to document the build of the robot in as much detail as possible.
Getting started
First I needed a few more parts from my trusted electronics mail-order shop. I also gutted a few printers to save the money for stepper motors and linear guides, which later turned out to be not all that successful.
The motor shield was put together pretty quickly. The library for controlling the motors is kept quite simple, so driving the motors isn’t much of a problem either. Here’s a video of the first motor test.
Unfortunately the Adafruit motor shield can only drive 2 stepper motors. There are still a few free pins on the Arduino, though, and a servo can be connected as well. Since the setup is the same as that of a CNC router, I only need 2 stepper motors for now: one for the X axis and one for the Y axis. A Z axis isn’t needed yet for the idea I have so far. But if anyone is planning to build a 3-axis CNC machine with the Arduino and the Adafruit motor shield, you could possibly add a servo to raise and lower the tool. A second Arduino with a second motor shield, talking to the first Arduino over the serial port or via I2C, would of course be conceivable too. In that case, though, it probably makes more sense to switch to a different solution. The following link offers a very nice approach: https://letsmakerobots.com/node/12713
In Part 2 I’ll then write a bit about the mechanical construction…
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