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Plotter - 2013

For a while, I've got my hands on an Aritma Minigraf 0507 plotter from Czechoslovakia.

I've naturally wanted to play with it, so I've connected it to a PC via an AVR microcontroller. The interface can be found online and is based on sending pulses to specific input pins to drive the internal step motors.

The higher level control was done inside a QT application using simple text commands.

A major limitation is the lack of any "zero" function or limiting switches that could reliably place the writing head in a known position. The initial positioning, therefore, had to be done manually.

One could continue by implementing a G-code interpreter or by integrating the plotter within some image/raster editor, but that seemed to be way out of the scope of this simple demo example.