ZENrobot

'Recreation In Slowness'

In contrast to the digital revolution, ZENrobot paints his circles very slowly. It's a kind of meditation watching this robot scratching his waves, circles and spirals in sand. This process can take up to 40 minutes, depending on the complexity of the pattern.

http://keinkunst.ch/zen/

2015 this scara robot was learning project for me. I was wondering how calculate the 2 angles for a scara robot arm from cartesian coordinates data. Many hours with google and testing until i get the right positions. I was surprised about the accuracy from the robot arm after i spend him a pen and a white sheet of paper.

Inspired from Bruce Shapiro and his  'Sisyphus' (http://www.taomc.com) i saw in a ehebition, i add to my ZENrobot a sand bed and a ball pen refill with a micro servo for the Z axis. Because i dident now about GCode at this time i had written the arduino code by myself. And the communication between processing and arduino is slow. Each step is done the arduino gives a feedback and processing can calculate the next (sub)step. 2day i would use GCode. Done in a smal version with 2 old CDROM sliders.

Another big challenge for me was calculating path moving between now and next position instead point to point moving. Google helps all the time... ;-)

Now 3 years later, a nice movie was done and the misssed chance put the robot in a exhebition i realised the online streaming project i had long time in my head. Again lot to learn about html, php, javascript and raspberry Pi, streaming, firewalls .... Success!

Technical description:

- The lightly modyfied robot arm comes from a kickstarter project

- Processing www.processing.org does the calculations for the patterns (first on my macbook; actually on a raspberry Pi 3)

- Arduino UNO get the angles from processing and does run the the stepper motors and the micro servo (actually one stepper is broken and does little jumps. need fix that)

- Raspberry Pi3 running the webcam; generates the stream to youtube and turn on/off lights; communicate with the webserver and finally generates the patterns

The movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmK1j-XQyCw

The real time interactive stream: http://keinkunst.ch/zen/ 

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