Textile Drawing Machine
Textile Drawing Machine is a drawing machine thought specifically to draw on textile. Unlike other CNC machine it's dimensions follow the standard textile dimensions (1500mm) and it's on wheels to allow to draw on an unlimited area. TDM has been developed for the project Digital Wax Print, a self initiated research project, carried out by The Future Continuous, a collabration between Olivia De Gouveia and Eugenia Morpurgo.
More information abut Digital Wax Print can be found here. More information abut The Future Continuous can be found here.
Machine
The machine is a custom build inspired by different projects, like this one here Following the structure of many other CNC machines, the drawing element moves on 3 axis x,y and Z. The Y movement is carried out by the wheels and Z reach only 2 positions (in contact with the textile, or not). All the 3 axis are controlled by stepper motors.
Firmware
The machine is powered by an arduino MEGA and a RAMPS 1.4.
The firmware used is Marlin v1.1.1 [here] (https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/archive/1.1.x.zip) It has been modified to fit the needs of this machine. The files can be found under the firmware directory of this repository.
G-code generation and controlling the machine
The machine is controlled using G-code. To send the G-code instrucions to the machine several software can be used. One very suitable option is to use Pronterface [here] (http://www.pronterface.com/).
To generate the G-code instructions for the machine, the python software contours can be used. It takes a png as input and ouput the corresponding G-code. It can be found under the contour directory of this repository. See instructions there.
To streamline the all process of generating the code, a frontend can be launched. It offers a web page with some basic G-code instructions that can be used to calibrate the machine and an interface where it is possible to upload the png file and convert them to G-code.
Digital Wax Pen
In this repository you can find also information on how to build a pen to draw with wax on textile with the Textile Drawing Machine.
Credits
Textile Drawing Machine has been designed by Eugenia Morpurgo (mechanics and electronics), Florent Noel (software), with the help of Sami Sabik and Come Turrata.