A zen garden should be a source of relaxation and escape from the everyday. The whole point should be to escape from–among other things–your electronics. Unless you are [MakrToolbox]. Then you’ll make a beautiful zen garden end table that allows you to make patterns in the sand using a ball bearing and an Arduino. You can see a video below.
Technically, the device is almost an upside down 3D printer with no Z axis. The mechanism moves a magnet which controls the steel ball and draws patterns in the sand. However, the really impressive parts of this project are the woodworking for the end table and the impressive documentation, should you want to reproduce this project yourself.
We couldn’t help but think of this as a really nice grown-up Etch-a-Sketch. [MakrToolbox] originally used a 3D printer control board to get everything moving but later decided to take a different approach. From the user’s point of view, a joystick drives the ball. We can’t comment on if it has the same soothing effect, or not.
You’d think that a CNC zen garden was a novel idea, but time has demonstrated that it isn’t. Not even close. Seriously. However, it may be the most aesthetic one we’ve seen.
This one is at the Questacon museum in Canberra, Australia.
http://www.taomc.com/sisyphus/
https://i.imgur.com/hZGK2zz.mp4
underwater zen?
For a best user experience, make sure there is no oil under that sand.
I have a bad feeling about there’s music in the video because the sound of the steppers are everything but not ZEN
A matter of taste, I suppose. I find the whirs and hums of my 3D printer’s steppers to be very relaxing.
And if you dont like the hum – Just get an TMC2100 – Quiet as the wind
My 3D printer has an almost musical quality to it. It’s extremely relaxing; I find myself just staring at it for inordinately long periods of time.
Same.
i came here to post this.
As someone that has built a “Zen Garden” I can confirm this.
Here is my post-mortem
https://blog.abluestar.com/cnc-zen-garden-maker-faire-post-mortem
Here is a video with the “natural” sounds
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYexS9g5Up/
I have issues with calling a two dimensional gantry system ‘technically almost a 3D printer’.
On a more positive note, there is a beautiful radial sand sketcher at the Questacon science center in Canberra, Aus. http://www.taomc.com/sisyphus/
I saw their old kickstart campaign on youtube the other day…
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1199521315/sisyphus-the-kinetic-art-table
They use a polar coordinate system. Some nice videos.
why is hackaday always overly impressed with sub par woodworking, coated with blotchy stain?
Probably because this is very good handiwork when compared to what is most often posted.
If you can do better, you should share some of your work. I’m always happy to see wooden projects that don’t involve laser-cutting.
would be thrilled to!
That’s more like it! Now you’ve enriched the site and provided more inspiration for others.
Impressive projects, too.
Congrats on the build! But I have to agree the stain is pretty bad and it looks like he had to cut cheater strips to fix his bad measuring. I saw the Sisyphus table for the first time last night and was considering building one. Hackaday to the rescue with a completed build I can copy. You guys are awesome. but in the future less is more when staining.
Looks like it needs a little less sand.
I want to turn this into a clock. Get it to draw the outlines so the numbers stand out more.
Or analog, so you’re left with the shadow of previous minutes. Or in the shape of an hourglass to take it full circle.
brb
You could clear it with some phone vibrators, or a bass speaker.
You could even add to the design with the nodal lines that occur at specific resonant audio frequencies.
Now, make the ball levitate as a drawing tool that lifts and sets down again to draw separate lines. One-up the Etch-A-Sketch!!
I’d like to make a garden sized one of these, obviously the methods required would need to be completely different and unless it used an overhead cable system it would need extra motion planing to not level tracks, assuming you settled for a wheeled robot stick in the sand solution.
I thought this was greatly over designed but no one else seem to think so (so far).
I would have used four corner pulleys that use dial-cord (string) to move one width-ways flat bar (slat) back and forth in parallel and then have four pulleys, two on each end of the slat that use a H-Bot (core x-y) arrangement to move a magnet back and forth along the slat.
The above has no linear rails but may have sideways deflection towards the center. That could be fixed by having the slat fixed at a right angle to one linear bearing on one linear rod – much better than having four of each.
Reading the title remind me of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A great, if a bit heady, read. This build reminds me of an etch-a-sketch.