Salvaged robot arm used for light painting and pen plotting

The members of Shackspace got their hands on an antiquated robot arm. It’s a Mitsubishi Movemaster RM-101 and was probably manufactured in the mid 1980′s. There’s almost nothing out there that tells you how to use the thing, and so they set out to figure out how to control the hardware.

This is a great example of how an Read the rest

making a light orb thingy

The “light orb” has become a staple of light painting projects. If you’ve ever looked through someone’s gallery of light painting, you’ve probably seen a few. There are multiple ways to make them, this project focuses on swinging a light, or multiple lights at the end of a rope while you slowly turn in a circle.

The addition of … Read the rest

Helicopter light painting continues to snuff out physics lesson on your brain

Cool picture, huh? Wait until you see the video footage of this LED-adorned RC helicopter flying on a dark night. But this isn’t an art project. Analyzing the long-exposure photography turns out to be a great way of clearing up some of the physics of flight which otherwise are not at all intuitive. The helicopter used here has different … Read the rest

extremely detailed light painting bar

[Matt Pandina] has been documenting his build of a very nice light painting bar on his G+ page. His light painting bar has 64 RGB LEDs being driven by an ATmega328P and four TLC5940 chips. He wrote his own libraries to talk to the TLC5940 as well as his own libraries to pull images off of a MicroSD card. … Read the rest

Robotic light painting in 3D

For the last few months, [Ben] has been building a 3D light painting robot. Instead of a couple Arduino-controlled LEDs that a person moves around the Lightplot, as [Ben] calls it, uses a robotic arm to move a LED in 3D space.

The build started with [Ben] testing his idea by putting a laser pointer on an altitude and … Read the rest

Build a rig to make orbs in your light paintings

We’ve covered plenty of light painting projects here. People are always finding new ways to create interesting things in this fairly new medium. This project covers a method of creating orbs or spheres in your light paintings. The author points out that many people do this currently by putting the light source at the end of a string, swinging it … Read the rest

Light painting with a string plotter

[Matt Bell] sends a shout-out to Hackaday by creating a light-painting of our logo with his string plotter. He starts off by setting up a pair of stepper motors which each have a spool to wind and unwind a string. The plotter is made by suspending a stylus between these two strings. In this case, he’s using a wireless … Read the rest