Eastern is coming and I'll be visited by dear friends and their children. So I need some Easter attraction for them :)

The SphereBot can plot images on spherical objects like table tennis balls, golf balls, eggs etc. It is inspired by the original EggBot by EvilMadScientist, but built from 2 old stepper motors and some steel rods (all cannibalized from old flatbed scanners), some MDF and plywood and a few 3d printed parts (printed with my MakerBot Cupcake).

The electronics are simply an Arduino and two Polulu A4983 stepper motor drivers (on the bread board).

The custom Arduino firmware directly interprets GCode sent over the serial port. So it’s no problem to print GCode from MakerBot Unicorn designs directly on the SphereBot. Thanks to the excellent Inkscape plugin from Marty McGuire (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5986), it’s easily possible to convert all kinds of vector drawings (eps, svg, etc) to printable GCode.

The firmware is open source and can be found here: http://pleasantsoftware.com/developer/3d/spherebot/

A video of the SphereBot in action is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8KnW9AQ10E

[Update 04/09/2011] Meanwhile I drew plans for the wooden parts (left & right side and the X-axis stepper motor retainer plate). See SphereBotWoodenParts.pdf below.

[Update 04/10/2011] I just uploaded STL and SCad files for the printed parts.

[Update 04/11/2011] The SphereBotSender GUI is now also available in a Processing implementation, i.e. it runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. See 'SphereBotSenderBinaries.zip' below.

The Sources are available on GitHub, see http://pleasantsoftware.com/developer/3d/spherebot/ for the links.

I'm currently still working on the drawings for the non-printed parts. Please stay tuned.

The sources for the Arduino firmware and the Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) application are available on GitHub. You find the links to the repositories here:

http://pleasantsoftware.com/developer/3d/spherebot/