Donald Bell of Maker Update was recently on the Cool Tools podcasts, and gave the WaterColorBot a very nice shoutout. He also mentioned Turtle Toy, which is a tool for creating your own generative art using a minimalistic Turtle graphics API. We recently found Turtle Toy as well, and have been inspired by the art people are sharing there.
Previous Cool Tools posts:
JR has been volunteering in a high school programming class and wrote up a thoughtful post about his experiences using the WaterColorBot in the classroom. He wrote a Python library that allows users to directly control a WaterColorBot by writing Python code.
To be honest, this library is a pretty insane way to control the bot. It’s needlessly low-level: you’re manually controlling the brush’s position, you’ve got to remember to wash and re-ink the brush every so often, etc. If your main goal is to just get the bot to paint a pretty picture, there are lots of better ways to go about it.
As a teaching aid, though, it’s been a total success, because it lets students flex their burgeoning Python skills and actually make a real thing in the process! We’ve been blown away by the stuff our students have created.
He has also documented and shared his code on github.
Laurel Pollard posted a quilted book bag she made using WaterColorBot with fabric markers to draw designs made using Beetleblocks. Her technique:
iron freezer paper to back of fabric to stablize, tape down. Use Sharpie ‘Stained’ fabric markers.
@susanettenheim @ericrosenbizzle @EMSL use #watercolorbot same as with paper. Fabric markers fit a bit snug. pic.twitter.com/cASsbgVPgU
— Laurel Pollard (@MrsPollardprime) August 15, 2016
This week for the National Week of Making, the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium is celebrating with a WaterColorBot and Beetleblocks workshop.
WaterColorBot always brings unexpectedness and whimsicality to your design. Here, getting the outcome does not become the end of your project. You feel you want to try more. Whether it is revising the code, tweaking the WaterColorBot setting, or replacing the brush, you are making a small but important adjustment for you. You find yourself in an eternal loop of iteration!
a musical duet played by #craftrobo and #watercolorbot @TinkeringStudio @ericrosenbizzle pic.twitter.com/lQi8udHTf5
— Ryan Jenkins (@ryanejenkins) August 20, 2015
There’s nothing quite like the sound of a robot duet— a stepper motor quartet.
Spencer posted on our facebook page:
Thought you might enjoy this photo showing the WaterColorBot in action while inking some custom “brown bag lunches” for summer camp.
Final results…
And here is another. Fun project!
They look great— thanks for sharing them with us!
The Tinkering Studio posted on twitter:
first experiments to mash-up #watercolorbot with #beetleblocks @ericrosenbizzle @MakerSylvia @EMSL pic.twitter.com/OI8TI4dl8u
BeetleBlocks is a system for enabling people to explore algorithmic 3D geometry by snapping together Scratch-like programming blocks.
They posted a picture of the finished painting, which looks awesome.
WaterColorBot + littleBits by Super Awesome Sylvia. She’ll be demonstrating it at Maker Faire this weekend!
Code for the project is here.
We had a great time at RoboGames demonstrating the EggBot over Easter weekend. Thanks to the contestants in both Combat and Bartending Art Bots categories that we were privileged to judge.
Congratulations to our friend RobotGrrl, who took home a gold medal in the Best of Show category.
Congratulations also to our collaborators on the WaterColorBot project, Schuyler and Roger who won gold in Art Bots in the Painting category.
Our friend Schuyler hooked up our Meggy Jr RGB hand-held video game platform up to control the WaterColorBot. He wrote on twitter:
I got the @EMSL Meggy Jr RGB working with the @MakerSylvia WaterColorBot. My code is here. https://github.com/docprofsky/meggyjr-cncserver.
The output looks great, too. Thanks for sharing your code, Schuyler!
