Tag: Plotter

We’ve featured a plotting machine kit before, but if you want something that’s ready to go out of the box then check out the AxiDraw, a USB plug-and-play machine by Dr. Lindsay Wilson and Evil Mad Scientist.

Hey, even I can be Van Gogh with this crazy contraption and I have zero artistic talent. Basically, the WaterColorBot is a robotic painter that gets it’s input from vector artwork on a computer. It can also will copy real-time sketching, transferring the design to paper with its brush arm and a set of watercolor paints.

I’ve heard of corrugated cardboard being used to house computers, but this project takes cardboard computing to a whole new level. Niklas Roy used rubber bands, rope and cardboard to create a functional, mechanical computer and plotter.

We can file this under art, or under why?/why not?: Invented by Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus, the Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus “downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book” and then, for some strange reason, peruses the archives of the United States Patent and Trademark Office for drawings that match the essential words in the book.

This unique electromechanical clock is like a cross between a Magna Doodle and an Etch-a-Sketch. Using a modified Magna Doodle as the basis for their display, the Clock-a-Doodle-Doo is the brainchild of a recent UCLA mechanical engineering class.