Raspberry Pi driven Polargraph exhibits high precision drawing ability

This polar graph draws some amazing shapes on a dry erase board. Part of that is due to the mounting brackets used for the two stepper motors and the stylus. But credit is also due for the code which takes velocity into account in order to plan for the next set of movements.

The Go language is used to translate … Read the rest

Thousands of physical pixels turn these walls into a huge display

The scale of this project is daunting. Each of the three white walls seen in the image above is made up of thousands of oblong square blocks. The blocks move independently and turn the room into an undulating 3D display.

If it had only been the demonstration video we might have run this as a “Real or Fake” post, … Read the rest

Logging temperatures with an Etch-a-Sketch

What do you do if you’re given a gigantic ancient printer? If you’re [IronJungle], you throw that printer on your workbench and salvage all the parts you can. After coming across a few stepper motors in an old Oki printer, [IronJungle] decided to automate an Etch-a-Sketch with the help of a PIC microcontroller and H-bridge chip to log the ambient … Read the rest

A closer looks helps you build your own DiWire Bender

Whether or not you’re actually going to build this CNC wire bender, we think you’ll love getting a closer look at how it’s put together. The team over at PENSA got such a strong response from a look at the original machine that they decided to film a video (embedded after the break) showing how the thing was put … Read the rest

Your mug on an Etch a Sketch — automatically

[Jim's] pretty serious about his Etch a Sketch. He’s gone to the trouble of building a rig that will automatically render a photograph as Etch a Sketch art. Do you recognize the US political figure being plotted in this image? He actually cracks these open and removes all of the internals to preserve the artwork when the reassembled body … Read the rest

Robotic whiteboard writes your wall on the wall

[Dave's] drawbot writes his Facebook wall messages on a whiteboard. The setup is pretty simple, depending on a pair of stepper motors and common household goods. As you can see in the image, the stylus is a plain old dry-erase marker held by a big spring clip (the kind that holds a stack of papers together). What you can’t … Read the rest

Automated turntable photography

[Muris] has a friend who is selling items on the internet. This friend wanted a simple way to make rotating images of the products and asked him to help. The result of his labors is this base unit that drives the turn table and controls the camera.

The first iteration of the turntable was powered by the stepper motor … Read the rest