Another robot drawing from Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 with the use of the pen lift mechanism. The drawing is blue Sharpie on banner paper, 23″ tall x 17″ wide. The dimensions refer to the drawing, not the sheet of paper. This drawing of the Doctor Who TARDIS police box sign took about two hours to finish.
Although the drawing is slightly skewed, which was caused by apparently starting the drawing from slightly off of the expected home point, I’m rather happy with this one. I guess my personal metric for whether I’m happy with a drawing is whether the final result is immediately recognizable as the thing it is supposed to be. The pen lifts and pen drops were very clean – resulting in (mostly) complete shapes. You’ll notice the “T” in “PULL TO OPEN” has a gap between the pen drop and lift. Although it might look like the “T” also suffers from a lack of straight lines, that isn’t necessarily the fault of the robot. The drawing was created by using Inkscape’s “Trace Bitmap” function to detect the outlines from a picture of a police box sign – so the lack of perfectly straight lines might very well have been a result of Inkscape’s interpretation of a bitmap drawing.1
This was the second to last drawing the robot and I created at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014.
- I blame Inkscape, but I chose the settings it used. [↩]