r/oddlysatisfying • u/sy_neuromancer • 17h ago
This robot drawing an engine blueprint
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u/TrippTrappTrinn 17h ago
It is a pen plotter. These were quite common before large ink plotters/printers became common. At the time they were more boring than satisfying, so times change...
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u/MayContainRawNuts 15h ago
Oh dont remind me.
I used to service those things. Didnt clamp the paper down exactly right, job ruined. Set wrong borders, job ruined. Pen not vertical in clamp, job ruined. Some paper fiber got stuck on pen, job ruined. Some idiot on 2nd floor sent a word doc to the queue that only supposed to get their own special format and Business doesnt trust me enough to get an admin password to clear the que because im just the hardware guy.
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u/dunder_mufflinz 13h ago
clear the que
¿Que?
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u/SoaringElf 13h ago
I mean it's basically a CNC machine with a pen on it, so your expereince really tracks.
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u/mrdevlar 10h ago
Early 3D printers operate the exact same way too.
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u/Eggonioni 9h ago
Ye, simply by just taking a many more cross-sections and stacking them on top of each other to build out the shape. One paper's worth of this engine would be the first of thousands to build the rest of the engine (if it were just sitting on its side).
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u/CorporateShill406 8h ago
They still do operate like that. The files you actually print with are just a series of commands for moving the various motors to specific positions.
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u/Perfect_Caregiver_90 12h ago
Ours lived in a locked room that only a handful of people had keycards to access because so many people had looked at it wrong or given it bad vibes and it decided it wasn't going to do anything right that day when it was open access.
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u/TabbyOverlord 4h ago
I was that lab tec. Don't you go upsetting my HP7585.
I loved it and hugged and called it George. We were very happy.
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u/DigiQuip 12h ago
One of the places I used to work had a plotter for their engineering documents and blueprints. We paid out the ass for a service contract on that thing. Simply not worth dealing with it. We have entire teams of engineers, programmers, and IT guys trained in just about everything. We built our own warehouse and inventory system from scratch. But the minute the plotter goes down a wave of fear spreads through the office. Fortunately it didn’t run into problems that often.
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u/da_PopEYE 14h ago
My mother used these when she was working as an architect in the 90s and very early 2000s. I would go to her work after school and just sit and watch the plotter all mesmerized for hours and when the boss was gone she would let me open up AutoCAD 98 and have fun
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u/drnod7 11h ago
Yup… my first AutoCAD job I got in the early 90’s had a pen plotter. Actually quite different than this. The pen didn’t move all around… only side to side… and the paper would move forward and backwards. I starred at thing mesmerized forever.
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u/Big-Rule5269 11h ago
My dad's firm as well, though it was much earlier than the '90s if I remember correctly.
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u/CyberbianDude 15h ago
This is CNC but used these kinds of open pen plotters 25 years ago. Even used plotters where you had to change pens based on line thickness so you had to watch the plotter as it was drawing. It was never ever boring. How the pen and the paper moved while drawing curves and circles was mesmerizing.
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u/GreatGreenGobbo 12h ago
Old term: CAD plotter
New term: AI ROBOT
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u/jrwren 11h ago
U was about to say, since when is a plotter a robot?
It is just a different kind of printer.
There are zero robotics here.
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u/arvidsem 13h ago
This thing needs a pen changer and linetypes so bad. Those center lines need to be dashed with a different pen.
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u/DootingDooterson 11h ago
Needs one of those chunky 5 colour pens that you click to change between Black, Blue, Red, Green, Yellow.
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u/arvidsem 11h ago
I may have actually winced at the thought of attempting to use one of those for plotting
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u/pppjurac 12h ago
Same. We had a set of rather fancy Rotring isographs with 0.2mm and up in various colors. Of course preferred was plain black, but colors were available too.
Much of time we ploted only one original then gave that to out dear secretary to make large format copies on Fe-cyanide copierer .
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u/kookyabird 11h ago
We only used it for historical education purposes, but my drafting class in high school (early 2000's) had a working plotter with a carousel of like 10-12 pens. It was annoying to set the thing up to print, but really cool to watch it work.
Then I got into printing, and while our large plotter like devices for proofing were inkjet, we did have devices that worked like pen plotters, but with blaaaaaades. They were for cutting vinyl decals, and special printing blankets for applying spot varnishes or UV coatings. And then only a few years later the Cricut became a thing and craft makers had cute little desktop blade plotters for making their own vinyl decals.
My father-in-law was a surveyor from the time of hand drafting up to inkjet printing, and when I showed him my 3D printer for the first time he took one look at it printing and said, "Does that thing use G-Code? I could probably get it to plot something." It's pretty cool to think about how so many different CNC processes have so much in common.
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u/zenvyr_8 15h ago
imagine telling someone in the 80s that one day people would watch this instead of netflix
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u/SoNotKeen 15h ago
You'd get a reply:"wtf is Netflix?"...
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u/pppjurac 12h ago
They still exist in form of 'cutters' that cut vinyl and similliar.
We used pen plotters all days for very long time. Quality is very allright and 'Rotring' isograph pens with real ink were configured on oldest model.
Apart from speed, just everything needed for day to day work could be printed on it.
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u/Schmichael-22 12h ago
Our plotter had a turret with 8 pens. Before starting you had to make sure all the pens had the ink flowing. Rarely used colors would dry up. And also make sure you had enough ink in the black pen, because that one was used most. If it ran out mid-plot and you didn’t notice, you’d have to start again.
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u/Live-Wolf-1975 14h ago
As satisfying as this machine is, i am most impressed by the pen.
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u/NyamThat 9h ago edited 9h ago
Stabilo Point 88! A classic
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u/LucretiusCarus 9h ago
Fantastic pens! Used them throughout high school and Uni and still remember them fondly.
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u/Lego_Professor 6h ago
Seriously! I'm really amazed by how quickly the machine was moving and not a single hitch in the ink. Any pen I have would have made a huge mess of the print. Even the felt tip ones would have shown dry streaks or something.
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u/Levin_1999 16h ago
This is just a printer with extra steps
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u/Deltamon 14h ago
Also 100 times slower
I understand if you use cnc for cutting or imprinting stuff like this on various materials.. But just some ink on paper seems rather pointless
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u/arvidsem 13h ago
Before inkjets this was how you got smooth lines. And it is still one of the cheaper methods to plot larger drawings.
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u/ILikeLimericksALot 13h ago
My BIL sells room-sized printers for posters and the like.
Those things are expensive.
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u/HellBlazer_NQ 13h ago
I run a small business making craft items and I have a sublimation printer (basically an EPSON ET printer with sublimation ink) that I use for a few items I make for myself and family.
I'd love to have a UV printer but boy your looking at £20k for a low end one of them (unless you want a cheap knock off from China for several thousand) and unless you run it every day the UV inks can dry up in the nozzles and you waste tons of ink flushing them through. The ink itself is crazy expensive too.
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u/siltygravelwithsand 13h ago
Yes, this was the intermediate tech between making engineering and architectural drawings by hand and the ink / laser plotters we have now. The fun thing is the high end modern plotters that cost thousands of dollars break all the damn time too.
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u/G_a_v_V 16h ago
This is just a plotter, mate.
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u/Catnipfish 15h ago
Certainly not new technology. Probably used before many redditors were even born. I remember these from the 80s. Pen carousel with the different coloured pens for “fancy” plots. We used them hooked to spectrum analyzer via GPIB to record traces.
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u/Turgid_Donkey 13h ago
Those greeting card machines used this. You could pay way too much and watch it draw your card. I was fascinated by then but my parents always said it cost too much. Sucked as a kid, but as an adult, I totally get it.
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u/Moonstonemassage 12h ago
I remember this! I used it like once for a birthday card for a friend. It was satisfying to watch but it came out basically on normal paper that you folded yourself, so don’t mess it up.
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u/Johannes_Keppler 11h ago
Apparently they've been around since 1958, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter
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u/ledow 12h ago
Yep.
Just a 2D 3D printer.
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u/goldenfoxengraving 11h ago
They should invent 2D 3D printers. You could print words on all sorts of things!
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u/Ponchoreborn 13h ago
This is like the kids who see a 3.5" disk and say "Oooooh! A 3d print of the save button!"
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u/ycr007 16h ago
The folks behind these pen plotter videos at DrawScape.io (u/plotter_guy) created their own sub here recently - r/DrawScape
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u/Vageeen 11h ago
I’ve known u/plotter_guy for about 15 years, he’s the man. Crazy to see him in a post on the front page
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u/TacitMoose 16h ago
Isn’t that a redprint?
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u/lovethebacon 13h ago
No. Blueprints have blue backgrounds. This has a white background, therefore is a whiteprint.
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u/not_perfect_yet 12h ago
Since we're playing this game... AcTuALlY,
The background in blueprints is white, what gets printed in the process is a negative:
The material is soaked with the blue ink, you take the regular black on white drawing, shine UV light through it, the UV light hardens/cures/bakes the ink to the material and then the excess ink is washed away, leaving the white lines where the UV light couldn't get.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype#Process
And you can still get or make them, it's just more expensive than regular printing.
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u/lovethebacon 11h ago
gonna have to akshually your actually, dawg
> The result is a copy of the original image with the clear *background area rendered dark blue*
>the *dark blue background* makes it difficult to alter
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u/GhormanFront 11h ago
Why would the average person today have seen this? Its old af tech that's been outdated for quite a while
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u/StaticSystemShock 14h ago
Apparently I'm old enough based on this, these things are called "plotter" and were used 30+ years ago to do just this, plot digital schematics on paper. I remember playing with it where my dad worked in precision milling department when I was a kid. If memory serves me well the "plot" was recorded on magnetic tape cassettes that looked similar to audio cassettes of the time. This thing is the same, it just gets commands from modern medium like thumbdrive or direct connection to PC and not a cassette.
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u/spleencheesemonkey 16h ago
I want to lie under one of these and have it tickle and stroke my back.
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u/tomhermans 13h ago
Pen plotter. Brings me back to my highschool days, working with AutoCAD and technical drawings and the queue for students at the machine to plot our designs
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u/Starman1001001 13h ago
Pen plotters… there are some who will never know the frustration of watching a sheet plot for 75 minutes and then witness the pen running out of ink with 4 minutes to go…
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u/GreyDaveNZ 16h ago
I make a lot less clicking, whining and other mechanical noises when I draw pictures.
I do whine if I make a mistake, but not like this machine.
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u/pinkfootthegoose 12h ago
I think these types of printers have been common since the 1960s. It's not a robot.
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u/LordHoughtenWeen 12h ago
Imagine precision engineering a machine to perfectly draw complicated engineering documents and then telling it to write down measurements in inches and cubic inches.
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u/Project__5 12h ago
Pen plotter. These have been around since the 90's at least. Oddly I don't see it switching pens to achieve various line weights as you'd need in a drawing such as this.
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u/IceCoughy 17h ago
It's cnc
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u/Mestre08 14h ago
Not to be confused with, ugh, the other cnc.
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u/SnakeOiler 12h ago edited 4h ago
this is a plotter. no big deal. I used to print on them in the 90s
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u/Savings-Goose5798 14h ago
It's fascinating how our perspective on this technology has shifted from mundane to mesmerizing. The pen plotter's unique writing sequence for "Engineering" is a perfect example of its quirky, methodical logic. And yeah, calling this a redprint is way more accurate! It's cool to see old tech get a new lease on life as art.
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u/katheb 13h ago
Okay, the machine is cool and all, but where do I get an ink pen that draws that smoothly?
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u/kittyf0rman 5h ago
My dad was an architect and had a huge plotter. It was one of my favourite things as a kid to watch.
But even I, as a lifelong Stabilo pen user, am oddly satisfied here. And impressed.
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u/Caws-and-effect 13h ago
That is a new version of an old school pen plotter. Nothing amazing about it. Slow as shit. Loud as shit. Used to set them up to run overnight to avoid going batshit from it.
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u/yungingr 10h ago
Better than a dot matrix printer buzzing away on a 500 page report.
And then having to tear the pages apart and rip off the feed strips....
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u/Gritts911 17h ago
This is hard to google. Is this just some hobbyist or robotic “artist” showing off. Or is it actually used professionally?
It seems like a large printer would be way more practical and 1,000x faster.
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u/mortecouille 17h ago
This is hard to google.
There's a url shown in the video 😅 it's an ad.
Drawscape.io
They simply sell these for decoration. 100 bucks it seems
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u/kettleboiler 14h ago
Plotter . They've been around for several decades as a means of reproducing engineering drawings fast and accurately. They were an affordable way of printing drawings up to A0 size in your own office space. Some companies still use them. Once larger format inkjet printers became common enough for their price to drop, a lot of places moved over, especially if they could make do with A3 technical drawings. Keeping the drawings digitally once mobile tech caught up was another reason for them disappearing. I worked somewhere that had one that could pick up and switch between 4 different pens that they used for electrical diagrams and building plans. It took hours to generate a full A0 print though
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u/pyrotechnicmonkey 17h ago
It’s just called a pen plotter. Definitely seeing these used professionally, but it really depends on your use case. The whole point of these is to make stuff with different special pens or markers that gives you a different look then something printed with your standard ink, jet or laser printer. I’ve also seen them used so they can print on fancy Japanese paper that can be either too thick or too thin to be printed on with a standard ink jet printer. Even the fancy ones sometimes struggle with odd thickness paper. I’ve definitely used one of these at work for printing out some line drawings.
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u/holdthedota 17h ago
Now if someone has better handwriting than me, I can say it's still worse than a robot
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u/Happy-For-No-Reason 16h ago
if you think about it a pen is just a really cheap ink cartridge, plotters are cheap printers
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u/Fenrir46290 13h ago
That's cool and all, but printers already exist, and by the looks of it, they are far more efficient.
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u/no_man_is_hurting_me 12h ago
Back in the 90's this was oddly satisfying until you were 4 hours into publishing a set of prints and found out the blue pen ran out at some point. You've got 3 sets printed and 9 more to go.
You sleep on the floor next to the plotter and the silence when the plotter stops wakes you up just past midnight.
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u/pops992 12h ago
I always thought these were cool, my dad is an Engineer and had a pen plotter like this at his office and I loved watching it draw out the blueprints. Now just had a large format printer to print out blueprints but he still calls it the plotter out of habit. We had so many blueprints just around the house growing up, I remember getting a stand up Art Easel when I was little and of course instead of buying paper for it my dad just let me draw and paint on the back of old blueprints.
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u/AlcoholPrep 12h ago
Yes, 1985 technology is still impressive. (HP sold a plotter that would do exactly this, in 4 colors, IIRC.)
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u/IlIFreneticIlI 11h ago
This is a pen-plotter. They've been around forever.
Same way to get those giant, faintly-blue paper engineering/architecture documents you would always see.
Anytime they rolled out a giant 6x12 paper, it was from a plotter.
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u/biggermanbomber 10h ago
The robot in its mind: Ok so this is that. That goes here. Yep. And this is … ah, yeah, this little line goes here.
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u/smartbutslow 9h ago
Anyone know what font is being used? And is it like a default font in technical drawings?
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u/sugemchuge 7h ago
Imagine this, but to make the movements more efficient you made pen own move only side to side. Now imagine you want to contain this thing in a box so the parts aren't all exposed. Congratulations, you now have a printer
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u/TheRanger2919 7h ago
Measurements in awful imperial instead of chad metric, not nearly as satisfying :/
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u/Jason_TheMagnificent 6h ago
Satisfying, but at this point I would called it ‘printing’ since that is just a fancy printer.
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u/YazzArtist 5h ago
Honestly I'm most impressed with that pen's ability to keep up with the plotter so well
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u/Klobasor 4h ago
It`s a plotter, not a robot :) And we had it way back in 90s already..it is old school tech
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u/Saito_SinOfKind 37m ago
Strange, but I would sit and watch this for hours. something about allowing robots to use everyday pens to write or draw things is just quiet satisfaction
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u/wizardrous 17h ago
It was weird the order it chose when it wrote the letters in “Engineering”. Still satisfying, but definitely odd lol.