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
Loading ...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!
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- Drawing Robot In A Box
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- Don't let SkyNet win! Take this poll!
- Photo by tenaciousme [↩]
- Heck, the robots are small enough that I’ll probably bring more than one. [↩]
- Or, comment below [↩]
Wii Nunchuk
Webcam! Sell portraits drawn on post-it notes for $1 to fund your next generation of bots.
An infinite number of monkeys?
I’d say have at least two machines:
1. One demonstrating gcode via USB (or whatever) drawing the most impressive images TinyCNC can do
2. One under joystick control, for the interactive fun of it.
Since the machines are so small, and you have to draw attention to your booth (as well as fill it with something), I’d say a full size arcade joystick would be most attractive, though that might be contrary to the “tiny” aesthetic.
@Kongorilla: I may be *slightly* more difficult to locate this year than prior years. This time I’m doing a presentation rather than a putting up a booth. The downside is that I’ll only be showing off the robots for about 10-20 minutes (still waiting to find out). However, I’m almost certainly going to have the robot(s) with me throughout the weekend and can easily set them up for a pop-up robot event.
@MakerBlock – I assume you’ll post here when the schedule is known. I’ll check back before the Faire.
HP-GL. Because all plotters worth a damn speak HP-GL.