Ewan Goss

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University of Nottingham > Engineering > Departments > Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering > PDM Exhibitions > 2024 > MEng students > Ewan Goss

Designing a compact pen plotter for home and office use.

I'm fascinated with objects. Everything is interesting; it can be a texture, colour, material, form, or the gestalt experience of using a beautiful piece of design. Objects, with use, can tell a story through patina - something you don't see with other kinds of art - we can become powerfully sentimentally attached to objects. I want to help make something which holds that level of importance in someone's life.

Product designing is my dream job, it's a blend of engineering and art that no other industry provides. I feel extremely privileged to have studied on this course, having the ability to learn from and alongside some brilliant people and use industry standard software to physically create things from my imagination has been an incredible experience.

The optional modules I picked were mostly extended reality and polymer engineering oriented, but the compulsory modules covered a lot of other topics (such as ergonomics, human computer interactions, mathematics, mould design and costing, materials, and the circular economy), this has given me a base understanding of many aspects of design engineering, and I will continue to learn more.

Please reach out to me if you're interested in my work, either professionally or casually, I'd be more than happy to talk about it or provide a portfolio.

Ewan Goss, MEng Product Design and Manufacture

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Pen Plotter

Modern pen plotters are very precise and operate quickly, but they were not designed to sit on your average desk - instead needing a large, open workspace. I wanted to design a plotter for the marginalised users, for home users, and for people who want an older style plotter with modern components and software compatibility.

Compared to printers, plotters are a fairly eco-friendly alternative capable of producing text documents and line art without needing ink cartridges, which use harmful chemicals in the inks and create e-waste. Plotters can also take almost any media, for example: chalk and blackboard, plywood and pencil, or a marker and linoleum. However, unlike printers, they cannot use multiple colours at once, and can only produce gradients by dithering; making them unsuitable for reproducing photographs, or any art with graded tones.

You can remove the paper tray and exit to fit rigid, flat boards - and by extending some of the intermediate material (the timber spine, the two long metal rods, and the GT2 belt which moves the pen tool) the plotter can accommodate virtually any canvas size.

The plotter is mostly FDM printed in PLA and converts G-code programming into stepper motor movement with an Arduino Uno and three stepper motor drivers. A 48 W DC power supply powers the plotter, it is connected to a PC via a USB-A to B, male to male cable.