Gallery > Etch a Sketch

In the project shown here, a Machine Science Starter Kit was combined with two stepper motors and an Etch-a-Sketch to create a programmable drawing machine. Notice the perfect circle on the Etch-a-Sketch screen. This is nearly impossible to draw by hand, but a snap for a microcontroller! In a subsequent version of the project, shown below, the device was programmed to produce a familiar representation of Abraham Lincoln. A JPEG image of Lincoln was converted into a stipple drawing, consisting of some 1,300 coordinates. An efficient path among all the coordinates was then computed, by analyzing the image as an instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem. When this path was plotted on the Etch a Sketch, the image of Lincoln appeared.

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