Could the Arduino Braccio arm be made to write with a pen?

Help & Support Robots & Kits
1

Hello all!

I was wondering is it would be possible to program a robotic arm like the Braccio to write using a pen attachment. There are a lot of short stories that I love and it would be great to write them out (either individually or together depending on font size) on good quality paper and bind them together beautifully, and the little imperfections that you’d get not using a printer + the machine running in the background almost as an art piece, slowly writing away, both really appeal to me.

How small of a font could I potentially create? I’ve looked into using a pen plotter but based on the feedback I’ve gotten from someone experienced with plotters who has tried similar things, pen plotters don’t have the resolution to create legible writing in characters much smaller than 0.5” in height, which is too large for what I’d like to do (https://www.reddit.com/r/PlotterArt/comments/obq6y9/has_anyone_use_a_plotter_to_reproduce_a_whole/). It would be great to get it close to the same size used in regular books or maybe a bit larger.

I have a little bit of experience with coding arduinos, but definitely not very much more than connecting an LED to a motion sensor. So I’m not entirely fresh but am very, very much a novice in this space. How difficult would this be? Would you recommend looking into other projects first? Thanks very much for any info!

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@spicehammer Welcome to the RobotShop Community. Your main issue is actually going to be what software to use to convert from text to motion of the arm. These arms are not meant to be used for writing, and at least to my knowledge there are not programs where you can convert a paragraph of text to inverse kinematics of an arm. An arm like the Braccio uses RS servos which are less accurate that a plotter, so no, the results would be far worse than with a plotter. To get the accuracy you need, the arm would have to have around 0.5mm accuracy, which is bordering industrial level (and corresponding price).

Even the Dobot arm is really meant for shapes as opposed to text:

Ex: Dobot Magician Tutorials: Pen and Drawing - YouTube

It sounds like you want something like this:

They seem to be using a router, but can’t spot the intermediate software they’re using, but you can look up “handwriting to gcode” or “text to gcode” as an option.