String art is as old as, well, string and something to hang it from. But, like most things, it gets more enjoyable when you involve a CNC. [Paul MH] went the whole hog with this build, creating a CNC string art builder that could handle the whole process, from placing the nails to running the string.
It’s an impressive build: you feed in an image, and the system calculates the location of the pins and the path that the string will need to follow. It then puts the nails into the board, pushes them in, and, with a custom attachment for the CNC, runs the string to create the art.
Of course, the path to this was filled with prototypes, failures, and dead ends. [Paul] has laid these out pretty well in the video for the project, which he just released. In this, problems like detecting when the nails are picked up and placed are detailed, and the prototypes and Rube Goldberg solutions that [Paul] came up with are covered.
Like all great projects, it is still a work in progress, but [Paul] has made some impressive progress, although he hasn’t posted the code and models for his custom parts yet. We’ve featured several string art builds, from polar platforms to fully formed commercial-grade builds that print your work for you.
Thought about doing this myself when the original string art post came up, good to see someone followed through.
It would be interesting to test if you can weave carbon fiber parts directly with it. Compared to the ‘https://hackaday.com/2023/09/25/carbon-fiber-with-3d-printing/’
If you are so German and love organizing so much that you optimize a whole artistic process. This thing even does its own nails. :-D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUeOJUnRJHU
Thats this Guy!: ‘https://wirestyle.com/’
I looked up the history¹ of the company and the guy is a physicist with knowledge of mechanics and electrical engineering. That’s like a mechanical engineer on steroids. :-D
But there are probably a total of 6 people involved.
But it also says that they came across this art direction in 2018¹. And Paul MH published this² article on his blog on April 29, 2018. But he is not mentioned anywhere as the creator of this machine, as copyright law actually provides.
¹: https://wirestyle.com/pages/wirestyle-im-detail
²: https://medium.com/@paulmorrishill/building-a-string-art-machine-eeee386a38db
There are no credits of him because its older than 2018, even here on hackaday are similar posts from other guys back to 2016.
Did somebody know who was the first artist who created this art? And art is not a patent.
Blitzschnell. Core XY at work.
Gorgeous, look at this real time processing speed!
I have seen this before in an inventor program on television. The guy had also built the whole machine and written all the software. I think he was from Karlsruhe, besides Aachen, it is one of the strongholds in Germany where the best engineers are trained.
When an engineer is bored… :-)
“When engineers get bored”
Best name ever for a youtube channel :-)
The first video on the Youtbue channel must be the Spongebob hydro-dynamic spatula!
Intro: Why? Cause i can! :-)
I think the most impressive part of this build, for me at least, has to be the thought gone into the routing software. It makes me wonder what other uses it might have with slight modifications. Great final results.
As is always tempting with projects like this, feature creep can set in, although some might argue the utility can make up for a moderate level.