I went to Maker Faire Bay Area 2009 and saw these cool little robots that held pens and drew lots of spirograph style drawings as it spun around. Unfortunately, I got distracted by something and forgot to go back to it.

I didn't get to go back to Maker Faire until just this last weekend. Fortunately, my daughter immediately caught sight of these robots and we built one together. It was a lot of fun to build with her and a lot of fun to watch in action.

A Spinbot is basically a tripod that has pens in place of two legs and a little motor with a rubber nub as the third leg. Start up the motor and set it spinning and drawing. It's a simple device, but a lot of fun to watch.

Here is Chris Myers' page on the Maker Faire website: http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/5241
And, here's Chris Myers' website with a few other pictures: http://www.isopoddesign.com/6.html

Chris' design uses lasercut acrylic pieces (some of which have been heated and bent), zip ties, double sided tape, and rubber bands to hold the pieces together. The heat-bending of the acrylic is necessary to give the flat pieces acrylic the ability to form a tripod.

After looking it over, I decided it could probably be made into a very printable form. This is my shot at it. Rather than creating a strict copy of Chris' work, I wanted to make a variation that would (a) be smaller (b) be printable in one piece and (c) enable to user to use fewer additional parts. One of the trade-offs is that I had to angle each of the legs at 45 degrees so I could avoid the use of support structures. The legs in Chris' designs appear to be at about a 30 degree angle.

Print instructions

Unassociated tags: art bot, spin bot

Instructions

1. Print.
2. The attached SCAD file is designed to allow you to use either the 4x AAAA batteries the original Spinbot uses or it has just enough room to hold a 9V battery.
3. Add motor, switch, batteries, pens, and draw!