Category Archives: WaterColorBot

Maker Faire Bingo

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With Maker Faire coming up next week, @techninja42 suggested that Maker Faire Bingo would be a great way to get ready! With the help of some friends, he put together a site where you can grab a bingo card to play during your visit to Maker Faire. We tried it out with the WaterColorBot, but you can use your preferred automated printing method to make your own, or maybe even find a robot at Maker Faire to draw it for the ultimate Maker Faire Bingo!

Send your maker bingo suggestions to @mfbingo for inclusion in the bingo card generator.

This entry was posted in Art, CNC, Field Trips, Robotics, WaterColorBot and tagged . Bookmark the Permalink.

Help wanted: RoboPaint

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James “techninja” Todd writes that a few more hands might be helpful on the RoboPaint project:

RoboPaint is an open source app for controlling painting/drawing robots, made for my daughter’s award winning Open Source WaterColorBot! The project is taking off with lots of users and lots of great features, and is all written in web standards node-webkit to run on all operating systems.

Interested? Sign up to help out at http://www.doerhub.com/for/robopaint

 

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, WaterColorBot and tagged , . Bookmark the Permalink.

A Compendium of Watercolor Paint Pan Palettes

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sargent art paint palette

As part of the documentation for the WaterColorBot project, we’ve put together a compendium of information about commonly available watercolor paint palette sets.  For each of the sets, we’ve tested to see how well they work in the WaterColorBot— in terms of physical size, color order, paint quality, brush quality, and so forth.

You can find the complete list on our documentation wiki site, here.

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WaterColorBot kits: In stock, and new accessories

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We’re very pleased to announce some updates on the WaterColorBot project— the watercolor-painting pen plotter that we designed in collaboration with Super-Awesome Sylvia.  First and foremost: kits are (finally!) available from stock at our store, now that we’ve finished shipping the rewards from our Kickstarter campaign and our other pre-orders.

We’ve also been working on a host of new applications and accessories that we’ll be writing about in the near future. The first new accessory is the Buddha Board holder pictured above, which indexes a Buddha Board (overly-interactive website link / Amazon.com link), that lets you make temporary paintings with just water.   We’ve found the Buddha board not only to be one of the best tools for trying out new things on the ‘bot (without using up paint and paper) but also to be great for live demos of the WaterColorBot, so that you don’t need to provide a fresh sheet of paper for everyone that tries it out.  You can find it in our new index of WaterColorBot accessories.

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, Evil Mad Scientist Shop, WaterColorBot and tagged . Bookmark the Permalink.

The Winch Cutting Jig

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WinchCutter 5

In our recent article, The Making of the WaterColorBot, we walked through the manufacturing process of the WaterColorBot, in which we make use of a number of specialized jigs, with varying levels of complexity.  We also left a teaser:

“The winch is also assembled from laser-cut wooden parts. The lower part has the shaft collar that mounts to the motor shaft, and the upper part has two halves that disassemble for cord management. It turns out that the winding-drum part of the winch needs to be quite round and concentric with the motor shaft for smooth operation– smoother than we can get with the laser. We solve this with our very-most-complicated assembly jig….”

And here it is.
Continue reading The Winch Cutting Jig →

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, Engineering, Open Hardware, WaterColorBot and tagged . Bookmark the Permalink.

WaterColorBot Software and Documentation

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We’re wrapping up this week’s updates on the WaterColorBot project with some notes about software and documentation.

Documentation

Our guides for setting up and using the WaterColorBot are already extensive, and still growing. You can find them at the Evil Mad Scientist wiki, or get there with a shortcut: watercolorbot.com/docs.

getting started booklet
Getting Started with WaterColorBot
One of the most important parts of the WaterColorBot’s documentation is our booklet “Getting Started with WaterColorBot.” The booklet covers the process of assembling the WaterColorBot kit, basic usage, an overview of software options, and a host of tips and tricks. It’s available on our documentation site in PDF format.
video still
Assembly video
We’ve put together a setup video, walking through the steps of putting together the WaterColorBot kit. The video is strictly optional, and covers much of the same ground that the booklet does. You can watch it at http://watercolorbot.com/setup.html, or find it linked from our documentation page.

 

Software

There are, at present, three primary applications that you can use to control the WaterColorBot, each of which has unique advantages.

RoboPaint RT
RoboPaint RT
The simplest of the three programs is RoboPaint RT, which is the one that we featured in our Kickstarter video. RoboPaint RT is a “real time” application that allows you to paint with the WaterColorBot. It’s straightforward and manual: Click on a color in the paint palette to change to that color, click on the water to dip the brush in the water, and drag the brush to paint on your paper.

With RoboPaint RT, you can also replay your drawing to make multiple copies, and save the file to open up and print again later. This program can be a lot of fun to play with and is a great way to get acquainted with the WaterColorBot. For those with good artistic skill, it can also be a remarkably powerful program.

 

RoboPaint
RoboPaint
Next up is RoboPaint, another stand-alone application written by the WaterColorBot team. In RoboPaint, you can open existing artwork in SVG format, snap the colors to your paint palette, and paint the document. It also has a rudimentary edit mode that lets you create new drawings to print. If you’re starting with existing SVG artwork, RoboPaint is generally the best of the three programs to use for a few different reasons. Most importantly, it’s good at automatically filling in large solid regions of a painting.

 

Inkscape drawing
Inkscape, with extensions
The third primary application is Inkscape, a superb, free vector graphics editor, for which we have written an extension (a plugin) to control the WaterColorBot. Our extension provides fine grain control over exactly what will be painted, but more-or-less requires that you create the artwork within Inkscape to take full advantage of the features.

Above, the drawing used to make the Robo-painted thank you cards that we wrote about earlier this week.

Inkscape is also capable of importing artwork in PDF format (as well as tracing bitmap graphics to some extent), and saving as SVG graphics that can be used with RoboPaint. If you’ve ever used an Eggbot (and its Inkscape based driver) you might want to start here, before trying the other apps.

 
And if you like to code…
For developers (and people who just like to tinker with code), there are additional options:

– Rolling your own, starting with our examples. RoboPaint RT is written in Java/Processing, RoboPaint is written in JavaScript, and the Inkscape extensions are written in Python. These can provide a nice starting place, in a few different environments.

– Direct serial control. The “EBB” motor controller board used on the WaterColorBot can be independently controlled from any environment that can send serial data to your USB ports.  Its command set documentation is here.

– The RESTful API. RoboPaint includes the “CNCserver” API for WaterColorBot, documented here. You can use this interface to control the robot locally (from your computer) or remotely (from anywhere on the internet, if you enable the remote option within RoboPaint and tell the other computer what your IP address is). Currently this is a low-level API; we are working on a higher level version where you can simply send an SVG file for RoboPaint to process and paint.

 

WaterColorBot kits are shipping now, and we are still taking pre-orders for December shipment. 

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