Im feeling very frustrated with this DIY pen plotter

Hi fellows

I have frustration for NOt understand HOW the the pic can manage the instruction of printing image, David is quite easy is about array and the program scan the line of matrix

And I neeed build this for repstrap and i hate use a sharpie and spend all the day tracing lines till get blind im have 35 and this save my a lot time really
pen plotter link

So picture this is a nested loop XY, so I painted using paint a simple "X" on white background and save it as monochrome BMP, later I open it on text editor (TEXTPAD) here is how look a portion

30: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
40: FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF
50: FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF

... AND ON SIMILAR BUT WITH 00 BETWEEN FF


The First thing come to my head:

!) Windows will ask something: eeeeeh where is the printer, Sir
2) How "swap" the Arduino in place of the real printer

And for the part of Arduino how i can create a routine for scan the line and execute when explore the last bit jump to next line of word array. I never saw beloved Poly where studied this kind thing, so starving to learn this because is new to me.

In the old times (meeeemories) qbasic it was the king for this, the great parallel port it was perfect for this ill do this in blink, but now everything is USB, and im feeling blocked.

So posted this like journal for some have the need like me to build something like this and this "journal" could be pinned as useful resource and everybody can add something in order to make come true this tool to make circuits board like the reprap and repstrap for example the RAMPS module

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/08/2013 12:42AM by jdev.