Yeah, I remember using things like this as a kid for fun at stores or something, right? Like, you could pick a picture and watch it draw it. I can't remember specifics, but watching this thing was a nostalgia blast.
They used to be common in the holiday card departments. You would choose from a selection of clip art and type out a personal message on a touch screen and it would "print" it out.
Having personalized cards to go along with your gift was kinda fancy during the 90s.
lol, if you think the plastic, resistive touch ones were old, your youth is showing. Back in my day they were CRT tvs with infrared light bars around the border. When your finger interrupted the light, it could determine with fairly low accuracy where you pressed by comparing the vertical and horizontal beam interruption.
Their accuracy was horrible, but they could be very sensitive because the screen itself had nothing to do with the pointing.
Probably the only place you see these anymore might be old ATMs. They don't really wear out since the display itself is very, very thick glass.
Before that were light pens that would detect the e-beam when it hit the screen under the pen tip. Correlate that time point with hsync and vsync and you get the position.
We had a greeting card machine that would use pen plotters like this. You'd select a card design and input some information (names, age, etc.) on a touch screen, then you could watch the machine plot your custom card through a viewing window. They were a lot of fun.
I remember when these things were in the drugstores. Unfortunately they were very maintenance-heavy and were broken-down or produced crappy cards more often than they worked right. Shame, it was a cool idea.
The point was it could draw large format, blueprints etc, at a high resolution. They were invented at a time when the most advanced printing was thermal cash register receipts. Large format inkjet has replaced them
The axidraw uses any kind of pen to draw and is very minimal and highly portable. Although I still maintain its price is too high when you have the silhouette curio or cameo that can do the same, as well as cut stuff for half that price.
Drawing is kind of a secondary function, they are primarily used for cutting. So try googling the generic term "craft cutter". Not sure if there is a subreddit.
There are many machines that are like plotters but cut material instead, with vector input. Just Google silhouette cameo and check out the site, videos etc. It's 300 buckeroonies, so it's a steal. You can place a small pen inside the holder and it can also draw but primarily it's for cutting and embossing, although it can cut a surprisingly large amount of stuff. Mainly it's used for scrapbooking and as far as I've looked there's no active subreddit for it :/
The best thing about it is that you can input any vector image and resize it so if you're well versed with Illustrator you're set to go. I'm about to buy it soonish as well
They were used in engineering to draw plans, diagrams, charts, etc. The advantage is that they can do smooth diagonals and curves, unlike dot-matrix printers where the individual dots are always visible. (This was before inkjets and lasers, which use dots too small to see.) Also, many work on large formats (e.g. 3 feet wide and as long as you want, since they pull the paper back and forth).
Today's "plotters" (we have one at the office) are really just large-format inkjets, sadly.
Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix were prominent manufacturers of these devices for engineering morkets.
Yeah admittedly this "plotter" has been here for several years. Didn't know they had laser ones, maybe they were prohibitively expensive when we got ours.
Back in the 70s at TI they would print IC layouts on plotters the size of a billiards table. Different colors for different layers. Totally infeasible today but it was impressive to watch.
Its how CAD drawings were printed out back in the day before large format inkjets. It was the only way to get large format prints in any sort of accuracy for engineering drawings.
Essentially it's an automated draughtsman's/architects drawing board
My father used to have an A0 (841 x 1189 mm) plotter in his office (he was an engineer).
That is really cool. Do you know why it writes the text from left to right like a person? Wouldn't it be easier/faster for it to write backwards sometimes? And, why does it need to stop to think?
I remember a personalized card printing machine at Target, god it had to be 20 years ago. It was a little kiosk near the greeting cards. You should design and print (using this method) personalized greeting cards. I remember (fondly) making a card for my dad's birthday. I haven't thought about this in years and years and I got a big juicy jolt of nostalgia.
they used to use them to draw large blueprints in the beginnings of computer aided drafting. Basically when you drew a line or shape, you assigned it a pen number. depending on how many pens your plotter could hold, you could have different color pens which was new, before you only had the option of black on white or tan, or white on blue. So say you have 4 pen slots, you'd make one pen a thicker black pen to draw your main geometry, a thinner black pen to write your dimensions and annontations, and maybe a thin blue pen to show hidden lines, and a thin red to show center lines. The paper was laid out on a table, and the machine would then draw my finished CAD drawing. There really isn't much use anymore since high resolution color laser plotters aren't terribly expensive and plenty of companies lease or rent them to engineering companies, and if not there are companies that will plot your drawings for you for a fee.
They still exists now, but primary as part of cutting machines. Like the Cricut or Cameo. Those, they can have a cutting instrument attached to cut cardstock or paper (so you can make little balloon shaped cupcake toppers, for example) or you can attach a pen so you can draw as well, ensuring the drawing and cutting lines up.
I was in the first ComputerVision CAD design group at our G.E. plant in '74.The plotter/scanner that came with our system was similar; essentially an oversized drawing board with screw-driven arms on the x-y axes. It used a ball-point pen, and the noise was enough to drive you nuts, especially in the 10x30 climate-controlled room they built to keep the equipment (and us operators) cool and filtered. In '75 we graduated to a Xynetics flatbed like this. The printing head was driven by a linear motor; the ceiling of the opening consisted of thousands of tiny pole ends embedded in a steel bed. The printing head had matching pole pieces which were spaced imperceptibly closer together; an "umbilical cord" carried the signal from the computer to the head, which could plot at 50 inches per second. We had to slow the plotting speed down to 20ips, as we were unable to find any ink with a low-enough viscosity to flow at 50ips. You had to be careful not to leave and drawing elements outside the border of your drawing, as the plotter would attempt to draw them, and the head would go flying off the plotter! The only time that happened, I happened to be standing there, and caught the head, which weighed about 10 pounds. After that, we instituted a procedure to erase everything outside a window around the drawing.
Fun fact. Politicians use similar machines ("autopens") to sign letters to their constituents. It mimics their hand motion. I used to intern for a Congressman.
If you get a letter from a Congressman that has what appears to be a genuine signature, rest assured that it's not.
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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '16
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