to mark as completed Makelangelo Polargraph Art Robot
All my projects & progress are available at marginallyclever.com.
This is my mural drawing art robot. The principle is simple: if you know the distance between the motors and the distance down to the pen you can find the string length with pythagorean theorem.
We can do that anywhere on the wall, which means we can find how much to change the strings to move from A to B. Once I had it moving in straight lines I added GCODE support. I didn't want to type 10,000 gcode commands so I wrote a Java GUI. I now sell this robot in two flavors: fully assembled (for people who just want to make art) and unassembled (for people who like to make stuff).
All the code is on Github. You can follow development on my blog.
I want to sell one of these robots to every school in north america, maybe even beyond.
Draws murals by following GCode instructions and/or etch-a-sketch style commands
- Actuators / output devices: two NEMA17 stepper motors for movement, and a servo for pen up/down.
- Control method: arduino serial window or java apps for gcode/etch-a-sketch
- CPU: Arduino Duemilanove 328 or better
- Power source: 12v2a
- Programming language: Arduino
- Target environment: any smooth wall will do. Whiteboards are especially great.