Pen Carrier Upgrade Goes Live

Here's a still of my pen carrier with the up/down mechanism installed, wired, and working, and here's a video sample of the bot doing its very first drawing with the new hardware. I'm sorry for the watermark on the video. I need to find a good free video editor.

The actual drawing is an .svg file done in Inkscape. It's a path tracing of a bit map image I found on Google images. If you'd like to have the bot do a drawing for you, send me an .svg (everything must be a path) and I'll send you back a drawing.

Further work on the Drawbot

Recent work on the drawbot has been following three parallel lines:

• First I'm working on a little servo driver board to control a pen up/down mechanism. I've got the electronics and code working, now I'm building the actual mechanism. In the first version I'll run power and comm through wires up to the pen carrier. I just got some wireless transceivers from Sparkfun, so eventually the pen carrier will hold batteries, electronics, and the mechanism, and control will be wireless. That way I won't have to cope with the mass and drag of wires.
• Second, I've rewritten my command protocol to less primitive and more robust. The boxes and pen up/down electronics all have the same address when initially programmed. Now I've got a command protocol where I can readdress the hardware and it will keep the new address in flash memory when powered down. Right now it's not such a big deal, but in the future this will allow me to very quickly reconfigure the drawbot (i.e. adding axis, other carrier controls, etc.) on the fly.
• Third, and probably the most fun, I've been creating a bunch of drawings in Inkscape for the bot to draw - and at the same time debugging my .svg reader. The bot will draw simple .svg files now, and I'm working slowly through the details of Inkscape's implementation of .svg and learning the math to draw cubic spline curves with the bot. The image above is one example of the Inkscape work I've been doing. It's a drawing by daVinci - vectorized and cleaned up a bit.

New Drawbot Attends Gallery Opening

I haven't been blogging about the development of my newest drawbot, mostly because I've been under such pressure to get it done. I made the deadline last Friday, and the 'bot drew pictures for several hours during the premier event of the daVinci Pursuit. I've also posted some pictures on flickr and video on youtube. Now that the hardware is pretty well worked out, I'm working on improving the software. I'll post more as things progress.

Mobile Post

I'm posting while on my way home from work. Don't panic, I'm riding the Indy Commuter Express bus, which offeres wireless connections while in route. It's the first time I've done it this year, and it's pretty cool.
My plans to participate in the Louisville LVL1 sumobot competition were swept aside by the flooding of my basement just prior to the Ft. Wayne Maker Faire. My sumobot is still a bare pc board and a cardboard model. I am working to complete it, having ordered parts for IR sensors and styrene for the structure. I'll be putting together a small vacuum molder and trying my hand at that soon. I will post pictures on flickr.
I also just ordered a bunch of nema 17 stepper motors. I plan on rebuilding my drawbot into something cooler and able.
Well, almost home now, so I'll sign off. More later.

Ft. Wayne Regional Maker Faire

Things conspired against me for my trip to the Maker Faire in Ft. Wayne. The weekend before my basement flooded and I had to completely tear down my entire electronics studio. This left me without a lot of opportunity to finish the integration of the pen up/down mechanism in my drawBot prior to taking it. I got it working and managed to successfully draw one .svg file before having to tear it back down for transport. Needless to say when I got there on Saturday morning I spent several hours of show time trying to get it to work again and never succeeded. So I fell back to drawing Hilbert curves again, like at Detroit. I tried and failed to get it running again Sunday. Then my laptop became grumpy and decided it had had enough. So, I packed it in early and left about 11:00.

Even with all the problems I still really had a good time. I managed to con my 11 and 13 year old kids into coming with me. That meant I had company, and they got to see their first maker faire. They hung with me all day Saturday, and didn't complain once about being bored. The folks from TechVenture did a great job putting on the Faire. I will come back next year, and recommend the event to all Makers.

See the few pictures I took here.

DrawBot Update

I haven't had a lot of time or energy for making since returning from the faire. I have managed a couple of advances on the DrawBot.

First off, I've made the switch from turtle type graphics, implemented in the Hilbert program, to drawing lines between coordinates. This may not sound like much, but it's one of the things I needed to accomplish to get the DrawBot to draw InkScape .svg files.

The second advance is I've gotten an .svg path decoder working, so I can create a drawing in Inkscape utilizing paths, save it as .svg, open it in my decoder, and get out a stream of coordinates, that when I draw straight lines between them, will reproduce the Inkscape drawing.

The one remaining item I need to fully implement .svg drawing is working pen up/down hardware. I built and tested a board this past weekend. Now it's a matter of integrating the new hardware and software.

For now though, here's a video of a spirograph type graphic using the new coordinate based graphics - Enjoy.

Successful Trip to Maker Faire Detroit

Well, I'm back from my premeir at the Detroit Maker Faire! It's the first time I've ever exhibited at a Maker Faire and it was great, and terrible. Here are some things I learned for next time, in no particular order.

1. I went to the faire, and manned my booth by myself. This it turns out is far harder than I ever imagined it would be. Saturday I was "on stage" just short of ten hours. Sunday I packed up early to avoid the rush, and because I was exhasted, but it was still a seven hour day. It takes a lot of energy to project enthusiasium for that long. I was totally unprepared for that aspect.



2. Given the chance, knowing what I know now, I'd do it again in a second. Exhibiting at the faire was really rewarding in two distinct ways. One, when I could have a long conversation with another adult who "gets" what I'm doing and understands what I'm saying when I explain it. I don't get the opportunity for conversations like this often, and the faire was great in this way. Two, seeing kids' faces light up when they'd interact with one of my machines and be surprised by what it did. I would very often have to coax them into touching something, while at the same time reassuring their parents it was okay, and I'd get rewarded with a big smile and an involuntary breathless little "cooool".



3. Damn the rules, eat, drink, and go to the bathroom at every opportunity.



4. Be nice to the folks in the booths around you and they'll be nice back (Paul and Mary were great!) Go mad dog robotics!



5. Don't expect to see the rest of the faire. I only got the chance to see about five percent of what I did last year when I wasn’t a maker. I was planning to walk around a bit after packing up Sunday afternoon, but I was way too tired.



6. The crowd has great ideas, listen and learn. I brought about six projects to show. One was my drawbot, and one was my electronic organ. Several times people played the organ expecting it to somehow control what was happening on the drawbot. GAH – what a cool idea!



7. Sometimes lame is cool and cool is lame. I worked really hard before the faire on an enclosure for my electronic organ. It’s made from walnut, brass, and ash, is very precisely made and has a really swanky finish. I just didn’t get it working quite in time, so instead I brought the lego keyboard I had working. Turns out the organ was the biggest hit with the kids – mostly because it was made from legos.