This was made in about a week's worth of afternoons. Very heavily inspired by Brunoip's printer:    • Impresora  

Yes, I'm shamelessly plugging HackADay in hope they'll feature this. Doesn't everybody? :P

The two axes are CD drive carriage assemblies. I had to go through about 6 CD drives before I found two that used stepper motors (I think they were burners, actually). Took apart about 8 floppy drives looking for some control boards that worked how I wanted them to.

The steppers are driven by the floppy drive boards, which I trimmed down to save space. The motor for the pen assembly is driven by a MOSFET, and there's a relay to reverse the direction of the motor, also driven with a MOSFET.

The whole shebang is controlled through parallel port by a QBASIC program I wrote. To make images for it, I make a monochrome BMP and convert it to text with some old tools I found. The program then reads the bits from that text file, plotting it on the paper.

Check out some progress pictures and more information here: http://forums.modretro.com/viewtopic....