PriNXT – Beginnigs

It’s not quite finished, but I’m really excited about this next project, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it beforehand. So, what is this mysterious project I speak of?

Basically, I’m building a printer out of Mindstorms NXT (hence the name, “PriNXT”). I know it’s probably been done before, so I’ve purposely not gone looking for how other people did it – I wanted this to be more of a challenge. And, so far, a challenge it has been. I’m pretty sure that it’s the most complex build I’ve done yet, mainly because I had to fit three motors, a bunch of gears, three long wires, and support beams all into a restricted place that has to be able to move around freely; it also can’t rest on the paper it’s printing on, so all the weight had to be distributed to the sides. I’m not going to try to explain how I got it working until I shoot some nice closeups of it, so there will be a whole post dedicated to PriNXT’s hardware sometime later this week.

Now, here’s a list of things: (very descriptive name for a list, I know)

• I’m going to try to write a basic text editing program in RobotC, so you can “type” something on one NXT and then transfer it to PriNXT to get it printed. That would probably use Bluetooth.
• I’m considering to add functions for underlining text, making it bold, and even italicizing it.
• The color scheme for PriNXT itself: White, light gray, dark gray and red.

In other news: I made a Technic camera jib for my iPhone, which, combined with the video editing software I got for Christmas, will make for some nice footage in the video for PriNXT.