Would you expect anyone to be able to assemble a drawing robot for less than $70? Well, the Diatom design studio, run by Tiago Rorke and Greg Saul, collaborated with Cheng Xu and Huaishu Peng of the CMU CoDe Lab to create this pocket-sized robot kit. They’ve named it Piccolo.
This tiny stand-alone robot provides an open-source platform for digital fabrication, on a small scale. Piccolo is powered by an Arduino board, and supports movement along X, Y or Z axes. Simply attach a pen, pencil, brush or possibly even an X-Acto knife as its drawing medium. Piccolo can then access uploaded libraries which allow it to create drawings. Multiple small ‘bots can even be synchronized together to create larger illustrations or paintings.
It’s pretty interesting to see the little robot drawing stuff for you – I’m especially impressed by it’s ability to use the Z-axis to control pressure.
The team is currently working on turning Piccolo into a kit you can buy, along with accompanying software libraries to get you going.
There’s no word yet on when you’ll be able to purchase the Piccolo for yourself, but you can keep an eye out on for their website to go live soon.
[via designboom]
