euphy
commented
3 years ago Lots of plans @unre4l but never realised. The the most obvious problem to solve is the physical mechanism to run the eraser. They tend to need a fair bit of pressure to erase cleanly, and get gummed up quite easily - remember rubbing stuff out on a board is a very very manual, iterative process - you don't just do one swipe (or two swipes or three swipes), you swipe and swipe and only stop when the pen has been been removed, using your eyes to judge. Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's 10.
I have seen one machine that had a small, spinning eraser, so to erase you just re-ran the first drawing, but with this eraser down instead of the pen. It was used for drawing one simple thing, then very quickly erasing it. Obvs it needs some kind of tool changer.
There's also an assumption that if you're erasing, you're also doing an unattended, or continuous drawing, and that needs some thought about how to get pens to draw for a long time. Continuous flow, reliable tips, bigger problem than I ever got into :)
From a software point of view, very easy to do, I'd approach it the same way as the pen lift works. That's very simple in the code. Mechanically, another story!
Hi, would be nice if a whiteboard eraser could be attached to the plotter, for example next to the pencil, which can be lowered to erase. Was there any plan to integrate such feature? If not, would it be much work to integrate (microcontroller firmare/control software)? Would love to build a polargraph which draws a new image every day onto a whiteboard wall! Thank you for the open source software of this project so far!