Polar robot arm – sketching a city skyline

I’m often thinking if it is possible to make Art with Arduino. Arduino is a machine, a little computer made with electronic circuits. It hasn’t a soul. Can an Arduino make Art? This is my question. I’m trying to do something with Arduino that could be Art, or similar to Art. The Arts are painting, poetry, music, sculpture and so on. I’m trying to do something in different Arts. The road is long but I began to travel it. This is my first experiment with painting. Indeed, a easy form of painting, the sketching in Black and White. Arduino drives a robot arm, that with only a pen sketches a city skyline. The skyline is every time different, the buildings are always different. The arm tries to imitate the human sketching, with errors, shaking lines not parallel and so on. The arm tries to be human, to make a little form of Art. This is the goal, I don’t know if the goal is reached. The judgment is yours. The robot is a polar arm, so it works with polar coordinates not with Cartesian coordinates. The hardware is:

- 1 arduino (2009/uno or Mega)

- a kit of makerbeam for the chassis and 16 ball bearings (www.makerbeam.eu)

- 2 stepper nema 17 400 steps, 0.9° (www.robot-italy.com)

- 2 big easy stepper driver (www.robot-italy.com)

- 2 pignons and 1 gear rack (www.conrad.com)

- 1 little servo motor (www.robot-italy.com)

- 1 pen

Details, pictures, source code are here: http://robottini.altervista.org/polar-robot-arm-sketching-skyline