3D Printer as a Plotter!

Working my way up to getting a laser on this thing! First a plotter, then a drag knife for vinyl and card cutting then frickin’ lasers!

This is my V1 Pen/plotter/knife holder, it has an integrated microswitch to make the pen a probe for homing and levelling, attached to a Mutant V2 attached to a highly modified Eryone Thinker SE, running on Klipper.

Instructions:

Imported and SVG in to TinkerCAD (the image imported was filled, silhouettes work best as you are essentially just printing the walls, if you are printing a line, it will print both sides of the line), set the height to 1 layer (I chose 0.2mm)

Imported the STL in to Cura, I have a custom printer setup in here for plotting with the below settings: Nozzle 1mm, heated bed=no and start_plotter and end_plotter gcodes (make sure to pass temperatures in the start, otherwise it’ll try to heat and do nothing).

In terms of gcode settings, 99% is achieved by 1 setting which can be found here: Special Modes then Surface Mode select Surface, this basically makes it print the walls only, other than that you need to set layer height to 0.2, temperatures to 0, min layer time to 0, retraction distance to 0, z hop when retracted to enabled and set your z hop height to whatever works (3mm for me, but I could get away with less). I believe you also need to set retraction min travel to 0.01, although I haven't tested the impact of this.

Make sure your start plotter macro includes at least G28 and end_plotter macro includes something to lift up your z and that should be it!