If you come throughout a type of web moments that makes you smile it’s a magical feeling and that’s what occurred after 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 wished to exhibit one thing at this 12 months’s Open Sauce conference to be held in San Francisco in the course of June, however on the time they realized they solely had two weeks to provide you with an thought to be accepted.
They’d been messing round with an outdated Etch-a-Sketch, attempting to attract an ideal circle by hand when the thought recreation to them to construct a robotic to manage the retro toy and, utilizing motors, get it to attract cool-looking footage.
The thought then superior to including a digital camera that may take an image, use AI to transform the image to G-Code (the identical form of code as a 3D printer makes use of), after which 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 easy sufficient’ as a result of it doesn’t, however the boys began out with prototyping solidly for 2 weeks, firstly attempting to get the toy to attract a easy sq., breaking one within the course of earlier than shifting on to a gear and belt-drive system to strive to not stress the system an excessive amount of.
Including within the digital camera to take footage after which 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 exhibits all the journey and is properly value half an hour of your time. In direction of the top, we are able to see simply how good the code and system has gotten at drawing with the Etch-a-Sketch and we look ahead to seeing what occurs after they take it to Open Sauce in a number of weeks time.