Month: May 2008

Pindar has created a robotic painting system named Zanelle that does everything from mixing paint to algorithmically shaping digital source images. Upwards of 25,000 brush strokes are applied in 12-36 hours to complete a painting. It would appear that Zanelle is intended to be more than a complex plotter, but rather a system that adds its own artisitc aesthetic (with some guidance from Pindar, perhaps). Read on for some pictures of the final paintings, as well as some before-and-after pictures from the neural net pre-processing.

The effect almost seem reminiscent of the rotoscoping in the movie ‘A Scanner Darkly’ and all those Charles Schwab commercials. I wonder how much is from the robotic arm versus the pre-processing algorithms. A question with any robotic artists (musicians, painters, etc) is what role the robot plays… why not just have a speaker or printer?

This is from a DC Dork Bot presentation.

Brushes apparently only last 2-3 paintings before requiring replacement.
Pindar says the next step is to add a camera to give the robot direct feedback from its output.

specs say it all: 20 Megabyte hard disk drive, 720K floppy, 16 bit microcontroller, 2 DC motors, 1 Castor, polyethylene shell… Capabilites: straight line and turning motion, object detection, classroom education, security, home manager?, friend. $7k (~$12k today) according to goretro’s blog. From the theme song: “Bring the future home to you, he’s watching you.” Do we really need human-like robots (like ASIMO) that try to do everything? Task-specific machines seem to do fine for many things, like a dish washer, dryer, or a chess program on a computer. A dish washer would be horribly inefficient if it had to make use of two arms…

Our new open-source kit is a PS2 to MIDI converter based on a PIC microcontroller, and we call it the MIDIATOR. It turns a PS2 or guitar hero controller into a MIDI controller. We’ll be posting info on how to interface a PS2 controller with any microcontroller soon.

We went to Maker Faire 2008 in San Mateo, CA, and brought our video camera along. This is just a small sample of everything that was there, including the destruction of Pleo (cute robot dinosaur) in the battle bot arena, powered recliners wheeling around (and cupcakes), cement and candy 3d printers, a dirt cheap multi-touch table, Tesla coils, lots of fire, and a bunch of music interfaces. Check out the makerfaire website for more info.