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marbeled-paper-machine-team.md 3.60 KiB

#Week 11 - Machine Design - Marbled Paper Machine

marbled paper photo

Click to see a 1 min video of the process of making marbled paper with our machine

##What is Marbled Paper?

final result

Marbling paper is a way of making designs with ink on the surface of a water solution and then transferring them to paper. It is an ancient technique, with references from 800 bc in China. It is used today to create images for use in bookbinding.

book with marbled paper

We built a machine that manipulates ink to make designs on the surface of water

##The Machine machine photo

We modified a machine that was partly assembled in our lab. It has an aluminum frame, 2 stepper motors for the x axis, one stepper motor for the Y axis, and a servo to make a simple up and down movement in the Z axis.

machine long comb comb

We designed combs parametrically in Grasshopper (thanks for the help Eduardo!) so we could easily make different combs with different width and spaced teeth. We designed and cut legs for the machine on the laser cutter.

overview of software

The electronics are run by an arduino uno with a shield. We create a drawing in Inkscape that is a path for the movement we want, then use a plug-in (gcodetools) that creates a generalized gcode for the path. GRBL then changes the gcode into commands that move our machine. GRBL firmware is loaded into the arduino, the arduino takes GCODE from the PC and converts it into movements of the stepper motors via GRBL.

circles gcode

gcode 1

gcode 2

##The Process

Click to see a 1 min video of the process of making marbled paper with our machine

adai and xime putting paper up

##Issues Adai and Eduardo

adai working

##Future Work
Ximena is from Mexico City where earthquakes are common. She would like to continue with the project and and simulate the effects of different intensity earthquakes in the designs that the machine makes, perhaps by shaking the water pan at exponential intensities reflecting the Richter scale. One set of legs we made for the machine accomodate shaking the machine.

##Team xime adai back of head More about Adai here More About Ximena here More about Lonnie here

##Gcode Samples
click here to see gcode samples from the Inkscape plug in gcodetools