Drawing Machine Using Arduino, Processing, a Sharpie, and String | Hacker News Reader

Drawing Machine Using Arduino, Processing, a Sharpie, and String

triangulationblog.com

138 pointssheaninesix15 comments

The repeat accuracy of such a simple mechanism is absolutely amazing. Never in my life would I have guessed that you could make some many reversals without some accumulating error somewhere.

Check out the middle of the last picture on the page. It looks like it didn't go up as far as it needed two about twice in the same line, causing a noticeable gap. Not at all trying to knock it here, amazing work for sure, just wanted to point that out. It could be intentional as well.

Most of the motion is in the up and down, which I'd guess is why you get some gaps forming between the "layers", but it still seems to be lined up OK in the angular dimension.

This bites pretty hard on hektor, a graffiti robot: http://hektor.ch

I met the kid who built this, year ago. He is a seriously rad ex-demo scene hacker, now art school prof. Lots of other good projects there worth checking out.

and this guy made a painting machine in the 70s: http://www.antonperich.com/ so the idea has been around the block.

..And many years later, his son Tristan has made a few drawing machines of his own: http://www.tristanperich.com/Art/Machine_Drawings/

yup i know tristan and that's how i met his father.

Amazing. Thanks for the links!

I'd love to see a four-pass of this using CMYK colored sharpies. I'm sure it wouldn't line up perfectly, but it might end up better that way.

The Penguin logo on http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/custom-polargraph-drawings... is a nice step in this direction.

Build or buy your own: http://www.polargraph.co.uk/build-or-buy-a-machine/

Code: http://code.google.com/p/polargraph/

I love it! This is art + algorithm + engineering + craftmanship.

If you're into this kind of stuff check out HackerThings (I made it, not for profit):

http://hackerthings.com/

It's for hardware and electronics hackers (and programmers, of course). A good book on things like this is Programming Interactivity at http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9415 (that's the kind of thing you'll find on HT).

There's a brief summary of something vaguely similar I made during my degree here: http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/09/lineographic-interpreta... (Lineographic Interpretations of Images, with an Etch-a-sketch)

The use of polar coordinates is interesting, and it makes the images look a lot more interesting than a simple X/Y. (Probably less mechanical strain too.)

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