Do NOT let this happen!

I want to put some finishing touches on my TinyCNC drawing robot before Maker Faire, but I’m a little ambivalent about how best to show off it’s drawing/CNC abilities.1 There are several excellent ways to control such a robot – perhaps you can help me decide?  My thought is that an IR remote would be really nifty, since I could just hand the “control” to someone and they could play with the robot, getting it to draw something.  Then again, feeding gcode to the ‘bot and having it actually draw something semi-recognizable would also be great.2

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For context, here’s the links to the various possible ideas for control mechanisms:

• Sending gcode over USB
• Physical numeric keypad
• IR remote – perhaps with this part from Adafruit
• A small joystick, such as this one from Adafruit
• Potentiemeters for Etch-a-Sketch-like wheels
• This wacky soft circular potentiemeter

Please vote above3 and let me know what you’d like to see working at Maker Faire!

1. Photo by tenaciousme [↩]
2. Heck, the robots are small enough that I’ll probably bring more than one. [↩]
3. Or, comment below [↩]