art

358 Articles

Art With Steppers And STM32

May 14, 2017 by 9 Comments

Automotive dashboards are something that largely go untouched in the average car’s life. Other than the occasional wipe with a damp cloth, they’re generally reliable for the life of the car and considered too tricky to repair as age sets in. Nevertheless, some hackers find themselves tinkering with them, and learn skills in the process, such as how to control stepper motors and talk to the CAN bus. Having done some projects in the past, [Dan] had some old tachometers lying around and decided to turn them into a piece of art.

The build is powered by an STM32 – a powerful ARM-based platform with plenty of IO and potential. [Dan] leveraged its capabilities to have the board generate music and react to its onboard accelerometer data while also driving the stepper motors from the old tachometers. The project was then completed by 3D printing a mounting plate and placing the tachometer assemblies into the back of an IKEA canvas print.

The end result is a piece of wall art that emits eerie stringed music while twitching around. It came about from [Dan]’s prior projects in working with dashboards. It’s a fun use of some well-earned hacking skills, but we reckon there’s even more potential. There’s a huge number of projects that could benefit from lightweight tiny actuators, and we’d love to see a robot made entirely out of junkyard dashboard parts.

For another dashboard hack, why not check out this beautiful Jeep desk clock?

Javascript Art Is In The URL

May 13, 2017 by 9 Comments

[Alexander Reben] makes tech art, and now he’s encouraging you to do the same — within a URL. The gimmick? Making the code small enough to fit the data portion of a link. And to help with that, he has set up a webpage that uncompresses and wraps code from the URL and inserts it into the HTML on the fly. His site essentially applies or un-applies all the tricks of JS minification in the URL, and turns that into content.

So, for instance,https://4QR.xyz/c/?eJzzSM3JyVcIzy_KSVEEABxJBD4 uncompresses to a webpage that says “Hello World!”. But the fun really starts when you start coding up “art” in Javascript or HTML5. There are a few examples up in the gallery right now, but [Alexander] wants you to contribute your own. The banner is from this link.

Something strikes us as fishy about passing JS code opaquely in links, but since the URL decodes on [Alexander]’s server, we don’t see the XSS attack just yet. If you can find the security problem with this setup, or better yet if you write up a nice animation, let us know in the comments.

Ancient Robot Creates Modern Art

May 4, 2017 by 21 Comments

They say that there’s more to a Jackson Pollock painting than randomly scattering paint on a canvas, and the auction value of his work seems to verify that claim. If you want to create some more conventional artwork, however, but are missing the artistic muse that inspired Pollock, maybe you can put your creative energies to work building a robot that will create the art for you.

[Dane Kouttron] was able to get his hands on an old SCARA robotic arm, and was recently inspired to create a paintbrush-weilding robot with it for the 2nd Annual Robot Art competition. Getting one of these ancient (circa 1983) robots working again is no easy task though. [Dane] used LinuxCNC to help reverse engineer the robot’s controls and had to build a lot of supporting hardware to get the extremely heavy robot to work properly. The entire process took around two months, and everything from color selection to paint refill to the actual painting itself is completely automated.

Be sure to check out the video after the break to see the robot in action. The writeup goes into great detail about the robot, and includes everything from reverse engineering the encoders to auto-cleaning a paintbrush. If you don’t have a SCARA robot arm in your parts drawer, though, there are lots of other options to explore for robot-created artwork.

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Hackaday Prize: An Autonomous Beach Art Robot

April 29, 2017 by 26 Comments

Some people find it hard to look at a huge, flat expanse of floor or ground and not see a canvas. From the outfield grass of a baseball park to some poor farmer’s wheat field, trampling, trimming or painting patterns can present an irresistible temptation. But the larger the canvas the more challenging the composition will be, which is where this autonomous beach-combing art robot comes into play.

Very much still a work in progress, [pablo.odysseus]’ beach bot was built to take advantage of the kilometers-wide beaches left by the receding tides near his home. That immense canvas is begging to be groomed, and this bot is built for the task. The running gear itself is simple – an extruded aluminum chassis powered by wheelchair drives with added optical encoders and dragging a retractable rake  – but the bot is bristling with electronics dedicated to navigation.  A pair of Arduinos run the dual odometers, compass, and a GNSS receiver, as well as providing a smartphone interface for on-the-fly changes. The art is composed as a DXF file converted to latitude and longitude points and exported to Google Earth as a KML. That means the bot can just be brought to the beach and allowed to draw autonomously. An early test run is seen below the break; better “brushes” are in the works.

Watching the art unfold on a beach would be relaxing, like watching a zen garden being created. We’re looking forward to [pablo]’s progress on this one. Of course, art bots aren’t the only autonomous machines that big, wide beaches attract.

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Ask Hackaday: What About The Diffusers?

April 25, 2017 by 82 Comments

Blinky LED projects: we just can’t get enough of them. But anyone who’s stared a WS2812 straight in the face knows that the secret sauce that takes a good LED project and makes it great is the diffuser. Without a diffuser, colors don’t blend and LEDs are just tiny, blinding points of light. The ideal diffuser scrambles the photons around and spreads them out between LED and your eye, so that you can’t tell exactly where they originated.

We’re going to try to pay the diffuser its due, and hopefully you’ll get some inspiration for your next project from scrolling through what we found. But this is an “Ask Hacakday”, so here’s the question up front: what awesome LED diffusion tricks are we missing, what’s your favorite, and why?

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Gawkerbot Is Watching You

April 23, 2017 by 13 Comments

While sick with the flu a few months ago, [CroMagnon] had a vision. A face with eyes that would follow you – no matter where you walked in the room. He brought this vision to life in the form of Gawkerbot. This is no static piece of art. Gawkerbot’s eyes slowly follow you as you walk through its field of vision. Once the robot has fixed its gaze upon you, the eyes glow blue. It makes one wonder if this is an art piece, or if the rest of the robot is about to pop through the wall and attack.

Gawkerbot’s sensing system is rather simple. A PIR sensor detects motion in the room. If any motion is detected, two ultrasonic sensors which make up the robot’s pupils start taking data. Code running on an ATmega328 determines if a person is detected on the left or right, and moves the eyes appropriately.

[CroMagnon] used an old CD-ROM drive optics sled to move Gawkerbot’s eyes. While the motor is small, the worm drive has plenty of power to move the 3D-printed eyes and linkages. Gawkerbot’s main face is a 3D-printed version of a firefighter’s smoke helmet.

The ultrasonic sensors work, but it took quite a bit of software to tame the jitters noisy data stream. [CroMagnon] is thinking of using PIR sensors on Gawkerbot 2.0. Ultrasonic transducers aren’t just for sensing. Given enough power, you can solder with them. Ultrasonics even work for wireless communications.

Check out the video after the break to see Gawkerbot in action.

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Making Tension Based Furniture

April 18, 2017 by 21 Comments

[Robby Cuthbert,] an artist and designer based out of Fort Collins, Colorado is creating stable cable tables that are simultaneously a feat of engineering and a work of art.

[Cuthbert’s] tables are held together by 1/16″ stainless steel cables that exert oppositional tensions that result in a structurally stable and visually appealing coffee table. In his video, [Cuthbert] leads us through his process for creating his tables, step by step. [Cuthbert] starts by cutting out bamboo legs on his CNC mill. He then drills holes in each leg for cables and mounts each leg on his custom table jig. Then, he attaches the stainless steel cabling taking care to alternate tension direction. The cables are threaded through holes in the legs and affixed with copper crimps. After many cables, he has a mechanical structure that can support his weight that also looks fantastic. All in all, [Cuthbert’s] art is a wonderful example of the intersection of art and engineering.

If we’ve whet your appetite, fear not, we have featured many tension based art/engineering hacks before. You might be interested in these computer-designed portraits or, if the thought of knitting by hand gives you the heebie-jeebies, the Autograph, a string art printer might be more your style.

Video after the break.

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