Drawbot Produces Portraits… Very Slowly

This robot artist, the Drawbot, produces images using an Arduino and Processing. A piece of paper is attached to a wall as a stylus connected to a couple of stepper motors scribbles out patterns that gradually become the image seen above. Each drawing is different and can take several weeks of constant operation to finish. That must have made debugging a real problem for [Harvey] during development. We wonder if this would work with homemade pencils?

13 thoughts on “Drawbot Produces Portraits… Very Slowly

  1. @Miguel Sanchez: That’s GREAT!
    I like how you just dealt with the
    “sloppyness” of your positioning system
    and kept on drawing.

    Some makers desire an extremely precise
    positioning system, and that removes a
    lot of the character of the resulting drawing.

    Your is wonderful. Thanks for sharing it.

  2. @alankilian: the math behind a loaded catenary took me a lot to figure out, and I am not using it on my system (just Pythagorean theorem assuming all straight lines).

    Machine was painting on a canvas with a charcoal stick (I guess it does not qualify as a high-tech pen).

    I did not mention it here, but some may recognize the head positioning of an old floppy drive with part of the original PCB of the drive holding the stepper controller.

  3. It’d be simpler just to put a dozen monkeys in a room with pens, and sooner or later they’ll draw something recognizable too – pseudo-randomly of course.

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