3D Writer
Teaching an old Ender 3 to hold a pen and lie in cursive.
Status: Active — Phase 2
Every 3D printer eventually asks the same question: what if, instead of plastic, it moved a pen around? So I ripped the hot end off an old Ender 3, bolted in a pen holder, and set out to see if I could get a machine built for extruding filament to write me a letter instead.
The pipeline is simple in theory and stubborn in practice: text goes in, gets traced with single-stroke Hershey fonts, turns into a stream of coordinates, and comes out the other end as G-code that Marlin happily chews through over USB serial. Simple, until the pen starts dragging between letters or the first line of a page decides to print upside down and backwards, which it did, more than once.
What Actually Works
- Homing, jogging, and live position reporting over serial (
COM5, Marlin 1.0.0). - Offline G-code generation from typed text, no printer required to test.
- Live writes confirmed on paper: circles via arc moves, short phrases, and a tuned 100 mm square for calibration.
- A proper handwriting mode — script fonts now travel word-aware, lifting the pen only between words instead of dragging it through every letter.
- A Tkinter GUI with a live bed preview, font/height/margin/feed controls, and one-click Generate / Save / Send.
- An SVG importer so simple vector line art can ride along in the same G-code job as the text.
What's Next
The long game is to point some AI at a handwriting sample — mine, or anyone else's who's brave enough to hand one over — and have it generate new text in that same style, stroke for stroke. Right now it just knows a handful of fonts and how not to trail ink across the page. No long-form writing job has been run yet, and the printer's between workbenches at the moment, so the next milestone is simply: give it a full paragraph and see what breaks.