The Etch-a-Sketch was a great toy if you were somehow born with the talent to use it. For the rest of us, it was a frustrating red brick filled with weird grey sand. [Every Flavor of Robot] has taken the irritating knob-encrusted oblong and turned it into something we can all enjoy, however, by building an Etch-a-Sketch camera!
The build is simple. It uses an ESP32 microcontroller to run the show, equipped with a camera. The camera is used to take a photo of the subject, and the image is then sent to a desktop computer. The desktop runs the image through an AI pipeline that generates a simplified version of the image, and the necessary G-Code to draw it on the Etch-A-Sketch. The toy’s knobs are operated by a pair of brushless motors which have been geared down to provide more torque.
It’s a neat project, and more details are available on GitHub. We’ve seen some other great mechanized Etch-a-Sketch builds before, too.
I guess etch a sketch could be used as a soap dispenser at the airport, eh?
I watched most of the video, pretty much enjoyed it.
But, it got me thinking if anyone has modified an Etch-a-Sketch to include “Pen up” and “Pen down” functions.
Although in reality a “Pen up” function would do the opposite by pulling the stylus down to not have it make a trail on the screen.
It looks like it works by just dragging around a magnet suspended by X and Y wires. Maybe you could replace it with an electromagnet that gets turned off during “air moves”?
When I “disassembled” my Etch-a-Sketch as As child, I didn’t think the “stylus” was a magnetic material. But then, I lived in a magnet negative house at the time.