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Show HN: Chalkbot

engineering.hipolabs.com

64 pointstunavargi11 comments

I built a dual axis laser pointer setup to play with my cat but she looks at the servo's too often because they're so noisy. I was wondering if I could use memory wire to control the laser pointer since it would be quieter.

Now I'm wondering if these stepper motors might be a better alternative, maybe a third one against some sort of a spring loaded harness.

Either way very cool, would be interesting to see if a third motor might have helped rather than relying on gravity and good behavior of the chalk pen.

I am doing similar drawings with Sandy Noble's Polargraph (http://www.polargraph.co.uk). How do you keep the liquid chalk flowing? Common liquid chalk pens need pumping over time.

art+com created a massive chalkbot at Jelling Museum in Denkmark: https://artcom.de/en/project/experience-centre-royal-jelling...

And here I thought it was the Nike Chalkbot: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HmW-eGCrSxs

Still cool though!

Nike Chalkbot was a project by Pittsburgh-based Deeplocal: http://www.deeplocal.com/projects/chalkbot.html

Definitely! It was before my time there - but Deeplocal is great.

Historical note on the evolution of drawbots: Nike's Chalkbot was a direct and uncredited steal of IAA's Graffiti Writer robot project/ Streetwriter truck: from political dissent to branded drivel in one smooth move.

The OP's Chalkbot however announces itself as being inspired by Jurg Lehni's HEKTOR (2002). Scholars (HT @Sandy Noble of Polargraph) will note HEKTOR's twin-cord design from 2.30m in this deeply awesome MIT MediaLab/ SIGGRAPH video from 1988. Made of Lego! Programmed in LOGO!

Presume there are antecedents (pendulographs, anyone?) for this too. AFAICS, Lehni does not acknowledge the MIT crew anywhere... tsk tsk.

ACM SIGGRAPH 1988 Issue 40 - Lego/Logo

https://open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8213

Graffitiwriter vs Nike Chalkbot

https://vimeo.com/6075609

http://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/07/07/chalkbot-ver...

Polargraph

http://polargraph.co.uk

Nice resource for drawing machines here:

https://drawingmachines.org/index.php

That's great! Thanks for detailing what went wrong, as well as what went right.

I've wanted to do a drawbot (paper and pen) for a while, and thought these pulleys[1] and belts[2] might be good.

1: https://www.adafruit.com/products/1251 2: https://www.adafruit.com/products/1184

I wonder what this would look like if they could speed up the motors and smooth out the motion with some more taught string. Maybe they could recreate more hand-like motions.

If you're in San Francisco, at The Interval, they have a chalkboard drawing robot similar to Chalkbot: http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/13/interval-chalk-board-rob... Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpQzIaH90f8

These projects are really cool.

There is also a very cool chalk drawing robot installed at the SF MOMA.

Very nice! I made a similar ones with LEGO Mindstorms in three dimensions:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=blYpo2qB_LI

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