The value of a mirror is in its clarity. If the reflection is cast by [danicakostic17]’s Uncooperative Mirror though, you’ll find anything but. It’s described as a useless machine, because it appears as a tiled mirror. As you approach it though, the tiles shake around and make it very difficult to follow what’s in front of you. It’s an art piece and a prank all in one, and we like it.
Behind the mirror is a 3D printed frame and a set of small servos with what look like some belts to hitch them up. There’s an ultrasonic sensor and an Arduino Uno, that sets those servos going as soon as the ultrasonic sensor sees anything. We can see this thing would be fun at a party.
Everything you’ll need is on the Instructables page linked above should you be foolhardy enough to want your own, and there’s even a YouTube video which we’ve placed below.
We’ve covered etch-a-sketch robots before, but usually they’re not quite as fast as [Every Flavor of Robot]’s “video” etch-a-sketch, capable of drawing a full portrait in as little as a minute.
The robot, nearly finished drawing a portrait of [William Osman]The idea comes from the motivation to make something cool for Open Sauce. Of course, most projects with a deadline come very close to missing it, and–like many an Open Sauce project–this one is no exception. Arriving in California, they realize they couldn’t access their code! Fortunately, they get a demo working where your portrait is drawn just in time. Continue reading “Drawing Videos On An Etch-a-Sketch”→
A twenty-sided die (d20) is a common thing in tabletop gaming, and [kati]’s slightly sentient d20 is a PCB that not only delivers random results on demand, but responds to hot and cold streaks and may even tweak the results a little to reflect its mood.
On its face the unit is a touch-sensitive PCB with twenty small charlieplexed LEDs around its perimeter, one for each die result. When activated by a touch on the center pad, the die dutifully animates a die roll and delivers a result. But something happens if the RNG (random number generator) coughs up results that are unusually lucky, or unlucky.
In addition to moods, there are reportedly other hidden features to discover.
After a streak of natural 1s, the device gets cranky. It begins to ignore the occasional activation input, and may glitch before a roll, reflecting a low mood. In addition, future rolls while in a low mood have a slight chance of being silently discarded and re-rolled into a low range (1-6), prolonging the unlucky streak. The inverse is true of a die that encounters a lucky run of natural 20s, with the die’s mood shifting to high spirits and having a slight chance of re-rolling future results into a high range (16-20).
The idea is to create (and feed) the feeling of lucky and unlucky streaks. Gamers are of course perfectly capable of projecting such feelings all on their own, which means the die acts as both mirror and amplifier of these emotions. In addition, each die acts slightly differently as a result of being imprinted with different RNG seeds, timing values, and response times which makes each one feel unique. There are reportedly other hidden features as well.
If you’d like to try making your own, keep an eye on the GitHub repository. The originals have design elements that were heavily personalized for [kati]’s gaming group, so the design files are in the process of being turned into a meaningful public release. Of course, there’s more than enough detail already to roll your own if you are so inclined.
[Kert Gartner]’s ASCII Aquarium turns a cheap yellow display (CYD) into a tiny simulated aquarium, complete with ASCII sea creatures each with their own behaviors. There’s all kinds of options and even timekeeping functionality, so the miniature water world can also pull its weight as a desk clock.
The fish and other animal movements are not a series of canned animations; each creature has its own behaviors and responses to things like feeding, which is accomplished by tapping on the screen. A hidden menu offers a wide range of configuration and display options, and there’s even an option to export screen contents as bitmaps.
Add a 3D-printed enclosure and the whole thing looks like a pretty nice weekend project. There’s even a display flip mode, just in case you have a spare 50 mm beamsplitter kicking around.
It’s a very clever use of a CYD that shows how good color and graphics can look when one designs with the hardware’s capabilities (and limitations) in mind.
The CYD is an ESP32-based development board with integrated touchscreen display, and is known for its affordable price and wide availability. This one would look great next to a CYD electric jellyfish.
Emergent properties include examples like murmurations of starlings which can’t be predicted from looking at a single bird, weather which can’t be predicted by looking at a few air molecules, and consciousness which can’t be predicted by looking at a neuron. Likewise, when adding a new tool to a workflow, emergent properties can show up as well. A group at Chicago University developed a robotic drawing tool and a few artists developed some unique drawing methods using it.
The robotic pen uses a pair of tendons to extend the working end out a certain amount. From there it uses a set of servos to can be programmed to revolve around in a defined path, making repeating movements while the artist makes larger movements over the paper. Originally meant for shading, small circles or simpler back-and-forth movements were preset, but with full control over the pen’s behavior the artist can shift focus away to other tasks within the creative process. A study with ten participants was done which showed artists coming up with novel ways of using a tool like this, and others reporting that it’s almost like drawing together with another person.
Looking for novel ways that humans can interact with computers and robots can often lead to surprising outcomes like this. Members of this group aren’t new to novel human interface devices either; they’ve also built a squishy dynamic button as well.
Self-similar images are rather common, which are images in which the same image is repeated on a smaller scale somewhere within the image that one is looking at, something which is also referred to as the Droste effect. Yet in [MC Escher]’s 1956 Prentententoonstelling (‘picture gallery’) drawing, this self-similar image is somehow also the foreground image, from where it just keeps looping around in an endless dance. How this effect is accomplished and what the mathematical transformations behind it are and how they work is explained in a recent video by [3Blue1Brown].
The video uses previous work by [B. de Smit] and [H. W. Lenstra Jr] whose 2003 paper detailed the underlying transformations, as well as the mystery of the center of the work.
Although [MC Escher] created a transformation grid with square rectangles into which a non-transformed image could be copied verbatim, he left the center as a void with just his signature in it, leaving many to guess how one might be able to fill in this area with something that made sense. In the work by [Smit] et al. it was postulated that by treating the work as having been drawn on an elliptic curve over a field of complex numbers this might be possible.
While the transformation is simple enough at first, with just four rectangles at different zoom levels to make up the corners, the trick is to connect these rectangles. Using the demonstrated complex method this can be automated, with the central void now filled in and creating its own Droste effect. This once again demonstrates the beautifully complex mathematics in [Escher]’s works, despite him never having had any formal mathematical education.
Odds are, if you like neon lights, you’re not thrilled with the LED faux-“neon” strips that are supposed to replace them. They’ve got their advantages, but the light quality of RGB LEDs lacks something compared to the emission spectrum of nobel gas, at least to purists. On the other hand, you cannot create an animation by bending glass tubes, like [David Hamp-Gonsalves] has demonstrated with his Neon Animated Eye.
Back in the day, you’d have needed dozens of tubes for a flickery animation, but [David] figured that since these LED strips are flexible, why not flex them? He’s using addressable LEDs — WS2812s, specifically — so activating and deactivating the pupil of the eye is easy-peasy. Opening and closing the lid is accomplished with a geared motor driven by a TB6612 driver turning a barrel cam. The ends of the stiff LED strip being brought together and pulled apart result in the blinking effect here, but as [David] points out you’re hardly limited that specific motion. There’s a whole world of Tron-like glowing animatronics that can be created with this technique. Code and STLs are available on GitHub, though, if you want to replicate the eye exactly.
[David] says he’d like to see this in a storefront someday, but given that fatigue life is a thing, it might be something to keep in your back pocket for seasonal displays like Christmas and Halloween rather than something that’s going to run 24/7. On the other hand, if you’re careful about limiting flexion and which faux-neon strip you buy, you might be able to create an animation that can last for years.
This is hardly the first time we’ve seen these faux-neon strips , but it is the first time we’ve seen them animated. We can’t help but think the Hauntimator software we featured before would be a good paring with this hack.
