Whenever you come throughout a kind 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 Each Taste of Robotic YouTube channel – a channel that has been round for lower than a yr.
These self-confessed nerds determined they wished to exhibit one thing at this yr’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 give you an concept to be accepted.
They’d been messing round with an previous Etch-a-Sketch, making an attempt to attract an ideal circle by hand when the concept sport to them to construct a robotic to regulate the retro toy and, utilizing motors, get it to attract cool-looking photos.
The concept then superior to including a digicam that may take an image, use AI to transform the image to G-Code (the identical kind 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 making an attempt 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 gadget an excessive amount of.
Including within the digicam to take photos 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 that they had one thing that labored.
The video above reveals your entire journey and is nicely value half an hour of your time. In the direction of the tip, we will see simply how good the code and gadget has gotten at drawing with the Etch-a-Sketch and we stay up for seeing what occurs after they take it to Open Sauce in a number of weeks time.
