Geek-Lab Assembled XY Plotter - Drawing Robotics - Painting/Writing Robot Kit - High-Precision - Corexy/Hbot Structure - Open Source for Maker/Geek

As with everyone else's review, Rene was immediately available (realize there is a time difference since he is in, I believe, Asia) to help me install the necessary software. Between Team VIewer and e-mail Rene got my plotter up and running and every question I had was answered the same day. I have psoriatic arthritis and the carpal bones in my wrist have been eaten away. That makes writing difficult for me. I just finished addressing and writing the inside of my Holiday cards as I watched the pen on the plotter do all the work for me. It is as if I had a disembodied genie working for me. There is a learning curve, however, and I would like to point out a few of the things I have learned so far. 1. You need to install the latest version of Inkscape for this plotter to work. Rene did this for me remotely. 2. If you are using this for writing or engraving, you need to use single stroke fonts so you do not get the empty outline of the letters (unless that is what you want, of course). 3. Rene directed me to FontCreator to make these fonts, but I am still trying to figure this out. However, when I contacted Rene I immediately was sent two single stroke fonts. 4. I discovered that in Inkscape version 0.92.3, which is a free program that Rene installed for me, there is a dropdown under Extensions where if you click on Render and then on that menu of Hershey Fonts, you will find many single stroke fonts of all kinds that you can use. 5. On the Hershey Font menu, you can only type in a line at a time and then in Inkscape you can resize all the lines, justify them, and distribute them evenly. It just requires exploring all the powerful things that Inkscape has built into it. 6. Once you have your text on your page as you like, then you can use another dropdown under Extensions that Rene installed at the same time. This one is iDraw which sends the information to the plotter. Then watch the magic begin as the plotter writes what you had on your screen. I cannot praise Rene enough for his expertise and patience with me. Now I am eager to explore other things that plotter can do such as illustrations and perhaps importing phrases from other programs. You can purchase single stroke fonts on the Internet but with so many in the Hershy Font already in Inkscape, I do not know if it is worth it. Of course, if one had a single stroke font, one could use that with the text tool to write longer strings of text or even an entire page. I will have to explore this further and learn how to use FontCreator to try to achieve my goal. I am also looking at a program called Calligraphr where it says I can write letters in boxes and then scan them for free to create my own font in my own handwriting. I just hope they are single stroke fonts. All-in-all, I am delighted with this plotter and the support is beyond anything I could have expected. Thank you Rene.

Bought one of these. I am an engineer, so I work on hardware all the time and am familiar with reading doc and getting things to work. This thing works awesomely. It does exactly what it says it will, and it does it better than anything on the market that can be purchased. The only thing I wish it would do that it doesn't currently is to parse gcode or sliced drawings from cura or other 3d printing slicers. It would also be cool if it worked with pronterface or other tools. I will likely convert this to using arduino CNC with corexy support to draw optical illusions and graphical representations of popular movie hero and villain helmets and other cool things like that and hang them everywhere or give away for Christmas presents. Thanks so much for an awesome product! Your company has earned my respect and future business!

Look like it a used part and it missing some items to assemble.

Easy to set up, instructions unclear but still followable just takes trial and error. Need help figuring out how to get my machine to life the pen up and down. Only moving on x axis currently. I plugged in the y axis into the board but it seems strange. Not sure how to fix so please reach out.

The item arrived well packaged and pre-installed. Unfortunately, the first power-up resulted in a smoke signal from the control board. So instead of returning the entire unit to Amazon, I first contacted the actual seller's support line and within a couple of hours, on a Sunday, I had a response with a commitment to have a new board on my desk within days. Shipping updates were provided along the way. (Superb product support by Rene, Thank you!) I did receive the new control board, installed it, and now this plotter works perfectly fine. The really good mechanical construction allows for very precise positioning during the drawing actions. I'm really happy with my first plotter and the support behind the product.

I took a chance on this because the Axidraw is really cool, but it's way out of my price range, and this one works beautifully. It's almost assembled when you get it, but you will have to screw on the protective acrylic cover over the board and attach the pen holder. Be careful when you're doing that not to drop anything because the screws are small and you don't get any extras. There are instructions in the software folder you download, but I also found it helpful to watch some inkscape tutorials on youtube because I've never used it. I slowed the speed down to minimize vibration, and put the plotter on a couple foam rubber coasters (they do give you little sticky feet to put on the machine, but I just did it this way) Anyway, it's cool! I'm glad I bought it.

The best part of this plotter was the tech support. I did have issues with it out of the box and the people (Rene) were super-responsive and able to resolve. After a bit of trouble shooting they figured out the problem and fixed it right-away, it's here printing away next to me as I type out this review, pretty amazing bit of hardware for the $. I've been doing a lot of metal work and purchased it to plot designs on to small sheets of aluminum, much better than a stencil. Will be fun to use with my 8-yr old kid as well.

There is no instruction manual or CD to explain how the printer works