Drawing Machine Using Arduino, Processing, a Sharpie, and String

The repeat accuracy of such a simple mechanism is absolutely amazing. Never in my life would I have guessed that you could make some many reversals without some accumulating error somewhere.

This bites pretty hard on hektor, a graffiti robot: <a href="http://hektor.ch" rel="nofollow">http://hektor.ch</a><p>I met the kid who built this, year ago. He is a seriously rad ex-demo scene hacker, now art school prof. Lots of other good projects there worth checking out.

I'd love to see a four-pass of this using CMYK colored sharpies. I'm sure it wouldn't line up perfectly, but it might end up better that way.

Build or buy your own: <a href="http://www.polargraph.co.uk/build-or-buy-a-machine/" rel="nofollow">http://www.polargraph.co.uk/build-or-buy-a-machine/</a><p>Code: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/polargraph/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/polargraph/</a>

I love it! This is art + algorithm + engineering + craftmanship.

If you're into this kind of stuff check out HackerThings (I made it, not for profit):<p><a href="http://hackerthings.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hackerthings.com/</a><p>It's for hardware and electronics hackers (and programmers, of course). A good book on things like this is Programming Interactivity at <a href="http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9415" rel="nofollow">http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9415</a> (that's the kind of thing you'll find on HT).

There's a brief summary of something vaguely similar I made during my degree here: <a href="http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/09/lineographic-interpretations-of-images-with-an-etch-a-sketch/" rel="nofollow">http://joefreeman.co.uk/blog/2009/09/lineographic-interpreta...</a> (Lineographic Interpretations of Images, with an Etch-a-sketch)

The use of polar coordinates is interesting, and it makes the images look a lot more interesting than a simple X/Y. (Probably less mechanical strain too.)