The polar Sketcher is a somewhat compact robotic arm plotter.
The motivation is to have a somewhat simple and cheap design to create a 2D plotter. It is also meant to not occupy a lot of space when idle as you don't need an entire XY CNC setup.
Take a look a the journey of this build (without looking at commits) https://youtu.be/corrBt9IMOM
The firmware of this project is designed to run on an esp32.
To upload the code from the command line run the following command from the PolarSketcherFirmware directory:
platformio run --target upload --environment uno
You may want to change the serial_port option in the platformio.ini file. The current one is meant for the raspberrypi when using the GPIO serial connection.
To download platformio in the first place run:
curl -fsSL -o get-platformio.py https://raw.githubusercontent.com/platformio/platformio-core-installer/master/get-platformio.py
python3 get-platformio.py
There is a feature still in development to allow for the storing of drawings in order to pick up where you left off. for this a local mongoDB is needed, for development se this to run mongodb locally:
docker run -p 27017:27017 -v $PWD/mongodb:/data/db mongo:latest