Automated Light Painting Makes It Easy

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What can we say — we’re a sucker for projects that feature our favorite logo. This is the Parallax Propeller Automated Light Painting Machine  — and no, it’s not a persistence of vision setup.

[Daniel], [Nathan], and the folks over at Embedded Aesthetics are big fans of Hack a Day and are very excited to share their new project. It’s a fully automated light painting setup that features an X-axis slide, a strip of RGB LEDs, a Parallax Propeller (microcontroller), and a DSLR — all you have to do is choose an image, and press start.

They first started light painting with their LED Paint Brush, an equally awesome, but slightly less automated tool. They’ve created this one to be a bit more interactive — in fact, you can actually go on their website, upload an image, and it will paint you a picture! But… it’s not available right now.

Need a bigger light portrait? How about one that makes images 4 meters tall? And this delta bot light painting machine is just too cool.

10 thoughts on “Automated Light Painting Makes It Easy

      1. Yeah that’s definitely an interesting idea. We have made a handheld unit, but not with an IMU – only an accelerometer . If you could keep track of the position of the unit, then you could know where it has “painted” relative to the image, thus ensuring nothing gets painted over.

    1. Persistence of vision refers to an eye/brain phenomenon. In this case the persistence is in the camera.

      From the article:

      “The light painting occurs when the camera takes a long exposure photograph of the LED strip as it moves across the tracks”

  1. Hello Hackaday community!

    UPDATE: I am happy to announce that the Automated Light Painting Machine is up and running for the evening. If you have the time (~1 minute) and a photo that you find exciting, please submit it to our interactive page to see it get made, and keep a digital copy for yourself. The interactive page can be found at:
    http://www.embeddedaesthetics.com/interactive/light-painting/
    ** Username and password are both guest

    After uploading, grab the URL for your finished photo, and return to the file submission page to see it get made over the webcam. Punch in your unique URL a few seconds after it completes to see the final product. All in all, the entire process takes ~30 seconds after submission.

    We hope you find this exhibit to be interesting and fun, and please feel free to leave us some comments or constructive criticism as Nathan alluded to earlier.

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