Hi!

I’ve daydreamed about getting a cutter plotter without actually planning on really getting one. Too expensive and shelfspace-consuming for something that I’m not going to actually use that often.

Then I remembered that I could “just” mount a dragknife on my Ender-3 pro to do the job (maybe get one of these fancy quick-toolhead-changing systems as an excuse to tinker with CANbus, or something ;).

After a bit of online search, I found that I’m hardly not the first one with that idea. I’ve found a few videos, posts on reddit and files on thingiverse/printables, but nothing too in-depth. So I wanted to ask y’all if you know any resources to check out on this. Some github-pages style homepage of someone would be ideal, but I’m not too hopeful that there’s something out there if I haven’t found it yet.

Things I think I’ve found out:

  • Roland Cutting Plotter Vinyl Cutters are apparently the way to go. With 45° for vinyl.
  • I can use gcodetools to create gcode from svgs. The exact details aren’t clear to me, though. Probably gonna have to create a klipper macro for this.
  • I can simply attach a cutter to my toolhead, or use something like the BTT hermit crab for a more fancy approach

Things I’m still not sure how to do:

  • If I’m using a BL-Touch - how should I handle z-homing? Can Klipper use BL-Touch for z-homing with an endstop-failsafe? Should I just monitor the print by hand?
  • Is there a comprehensive guide on the materials?

Do you have any experience on that topic?

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I’ve never done a cutter but I mounted a pen to my printer to make into an plotter

    You pretty much just have to make a carriage that can hold whatever the thing is and then dial in z depth. I would imagine the hard part for a cutter is getting enough force to cut but not so much that you mangle shit, but that’s probably just experimenting a bit. You’ll need some kind of cutting mat to put on the bed I would think

    I knew someone that had a cricut and that was just a xy cutter that used a few different tool heads. It had one that looked like an exacto knife and one that looked like a pizza cutter but I don’t know what their functions were, I think vinyl vs fabric?