Found Materials Drawing Machine

I built a drawing robot with wood found in the desert! The machanism and software is heavily based on BranchioGraph, with a different construct and orientation that required some tinkering to figure out.

very ad-hoc calibration setup ft. printed protractor and earing

first run! It drew a bonfire.

Even after calibration the drawing is still a little… wonky, because of the elasticity in the sticks, the looseness of the joints, and inacuracies of servo controls. In some ways, though, these faults added a layer of intermediacy to the drawing (or the act of drawing), which one may see as part of the machine’s touch.

A drawing of a vectorized picture of us building pallet racks.

The bot even participated in our weekly drink-and-draw event. People blew into a alcohol sensor appended to the raspberry Pi, whose reading were used to parametrize the open-cv vectorize function. (So technically, we drank and it drew.) Here is a video of the bot figure drawing.

  You may find my code for it here.