XY

From last prototyping experience, I learned a lesson that maybe I should treat X movement and Y movement seperately. So I look into some classical mechanism and try to design the mechanism myself.

Automata

Automata is always interesting to me. Usually they would have cam.

I watched a youtube video of how to build automata xy writing machine.


I found that the movement is always using a huge cam to trigger a small movement. The XY movement is using 2 seperate CAMs. Also it would have something like rubber band to keep the index tangent to the cam.
The thing is that I want the opposite. I want to make this piece’s mechanism part smaller and the rotating part bigger. Also, this piece movement is not so light as writing something, where the friction between pencil and paper is the only force. I want to use this mechanism to actually rotate something.

Lever

I need to combine the lever with the cam. So I come up with an idea of setting a fixed point for the rod.

When the cam is rotating, the panel would always be following the track.

Left and right movement

I use a simple mechanism to transfer the rotation to x and y movement.

Combined