Friday, November 7, 2008

Lego Mindstorm Drawing Robot

Back in the fall of 2007 (yup, I've been delinquent about posting this), I took a class in the School of Art here at UW called ART 383 - Interaction Design - Designing Behaviors. The class basically involved building cool interactive robots with Leog Mindstorm robotic kits. What's not to love about that?



My team built a drawing robot:



The Spydr Drawing Robot



We called it the Spydr bot: it hung on a white board using two almost invisible strands of fishing line, making it appear to float in space as it moved over the surface of the board.



Once we worked out the crazy math involved in converting geometric drawing commands into the proper motor controls, we could do some relatively precise drawing:



The Spydr Drawing Robot The Spydr Drawing Robot



From there, the sky is the limit. Check out this highly stylized Mona Lisa:





The class was a blast, and though it didn't put me any closer to graduation, I would definitely take it again. I mean, come on. Legos!

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