These days, everyone’s got a million different devices that can take a passable photo. That’s not special anymore. A camera that draws what it sees, though? That’s kind of fun. That’s precisely what [Jens] has built—an instant sketch camera!
The sketch camera looks like a miniature drawing easel, holding a rectangular slip of paper not dissimilar in size to the Polaroid film of old. The 3D-printed frame rocks a Raspberry Pi controlling a simple pen plotter, using SG90 servos to position the drawing implement and trace out a drawing. So far, so simple. The real magic is in the image processing, which takes any old photo with the Pi camera and turns it into a sketch in the first place. This is achieved with the OpenCV image processing library, using an edge detection algorithm along with some additional filtering to do the job.
If you’ve ever wanted to take Polaroids that looked like sketches when you’re out on the go, this is a great way to do it. We’ve featured some other great plotter builds before, too, just few that are as compact and portable as this one. Video after the break.
A camera like the one in the Flintstones ? great !
It’s a living!
Next up, the “baby elephant vacuum cleaner.
So the imps have been replaced by servos, got to keep up with modern technology I guess. Now if only there was something to replace the clacks so the pictures can be shared with everybody.
“im drawing as fast as i can, and besides, im out of blue”
Instead of an iconograph with a pen, you could make an iconograph with a stylus and make “spirit duplicator” masters to be copied.
Jaquet-Droz, thou should’st be living at this hour!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata
Do you have to buy the item to see the source code?
I would like to build something like this for my sister. She’s in univ and her professors insists on hand written assignments
She doesn’t mind but I almost tear up from the massive waste of time and effort
I wonder if the handwritten rule is an attempt to avoid AI tools. And I wonder how much an autopen is.
Handwriting helps with memorising.. as they say. Not sure it does. Not sure memorising is learning either…
If you don’t memorize the multiplication table, you will be much much slower than basically everybody else.
If you don’t memorize a boatload of historical facts, (who, when and where x a bunch) then understanding why history took place the way it did will be almost impossible.
Exactly, almost like studying is actually important.
Building one would be cheap, but you’re right about getting around generative tooling. Smart teachers have noticed that handwritten work both results in better educational outcomes and makes it harder to have a chatbot do all of your work for you.
I wouldn’t play games like that. Getting kicked out of school isn’t worth it. That said, I’d use a different approach for the motion if you wanted to recreate this for handwriting.
This is a cute project, they sell children’s toy robots that draw like this for about 30USD. Kind of complicated but I do like how it touches on computer vision basics, electronics basics, mechanics basics, etc.
If you think it’s a waste you have an extremely poor understanding of how memory is formed. Writing assignments by hand is good actually.
“And honestly ChatGPT helped me with most of the equations and code…”
or learn how to draw..
You must be new around here.