Chalk is fun to draw with, and some people even get really good at using it to make art on the sidewalk. If you don’t like tediously developing such skills, though, you could go another route. [MrDadVs] built a robot to scrawl chalk pictures for him, and the results speak for themselves.
The robot is known as AP for reasons you’ll have to watch the video to understand. You might be imagining a little rover that crawls around on wheels dotting at the pavement with a stick of chalk, but the actual design is quite different. Instead, [MrDadVs] effectively built a polar-coordinate plotter to make chalk pictures on the ground. AP has a arm loaded with a custom liquid chalk delivery system for marking the pavement. It’s rotated by a stepper motor with the aid of a 3D-printed geartrain that helps give it enough torque. It’s controlled by an ESP32 running the FluidNC software which is a flexible open-source CNC firmware. [MrDadVs] does a great job of explaining how everything works together, from converting cartesian coordinates into a polar format, to getting the machine to work wirelessly.
Building a capable sidewalk chalk robot seems like a great way to spend six months. Particularly when it can draw this well. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Antoine Leblond for the tip!]
So freaking awesome!!!!!!
I really enjoyed this. I’m curious now about his code converting Cartesian to polar.
Will definitely be checking out that software as well. Might help with some things I want to do
Cartesian to/from polar is pretty simple – just basic trig everyone gets taught at school – Wikipedia will get you started.
Nice one!
Ephemeral art is always fun.
I made something similar that prints with sand https://hackaday.com/2017/09/03/poetry-in-motion-with-a-sand-dispensing-dot-matrix-printer/
That I’ve since upgraded to print images.
I found that in needing human interaction to push the device it ends up being performance art with all that that entails :-)
Neat, but definitely not the first sidewalk painter. There’s been others on HaD before – though off the top of my head I can only remember ones using a dot-matrix style arrangement.
Apart from the great technical achievement…
Great video style and humor! Seems to be the first yt video ever. Subscribed and waiting for more.
Automation: making humans obsolete since 19…
Now with more AI!
There are already several solutions for polar robots that handle g-code. Why re-invent the wheel?
Sir, this is Hack-a-Day. Precanned-4-U is that way. –>
Sorry, I was editing my comment and hit “Reply” before giving it another read-through, and apparently my original meaning got lost. I meant to specifically refer to the choice of firmware, not the entire project.
But why would you want to automate a child’s playtime activity
After going for the adult’s job, now it’s time for children’s fun.
“Progress”, as the call it.
So, “Mr Dad” teaching a robot how to draw with chalks instead of his own kids is good because…
As if the poor boys hadn’t already too many machines to be depending on. Well: at least, they can go play outside by themselves,”old fashion” mode, while the robot enjoys itself.
Hackaday: “If you don’t like tediously developing such skills”
Yes: why do something a little difficult and learn something in the process, if the machines can do it faster, better, cheaper…
Hackaday fully automated, taken over and written by the IAs in three, two, one…
You haven’t watched the video, have you?