When you come throughout a kind of web moments that makes you smile it’s a magical feeling and that’s what occurred when we found this superb challenge on the Every Flavor of Robot YouTube channel – a channel that has been round for lower than a 12 months.
These self-confessed nerds determined they needed to exhibit one thing at this 12 months’s Open Sauce convention to be held in San Francisco in the midst of June, however on the time they realized they solely had two weeks to provide you with an thought to be accepted.
They had been messing round with an outdated Etch-a-Sketch, making an attempt to draw an ideal circle by hand when the thought sport to them to construct a robotic to management the retro toy and, utilizing motors, get it to draw cool-looking footage.
The thought then superior to including a digital camera that might take an image, use AI to convert the image to G-Code (the identical form of code as a 3D printer makes use of), and then ship the code to the motors which might then flip the wheels of the Etch-a-Sketch and recreate the image life in a matter of seconds.
We’re not even going to say, ‘sounds simple enough’ as a result of it doesn’t, however the boys began out with prototyping solidly for 2 weeks, firstly making an attempt to get the toy to draw a easy sq., breaking one within the course of earlier than transferring on to a gear and belt-drive system to strive not to stress the gadget an excessive amount of.
Adding within the digital camera to take footage and then create Etch-A-Sketch artwork was one of many final issues they did and after many code iterations and tweaks, they lastly realized they’d one thing that labored.
The video above reveals your complete journey and is effectively value half an hour of your time. Towards the top, we will see simply how good the code and gadget has gotten at drawing with the Etch-a-Sketch and we glance ahead to seeing what happens when they take it to Open Sauce in a number of weeks time.