I’ve been working on a drawing robot lately. My goal is to make something work like the scribblebot that is featured in the current volume of the magazine. My friend 3ric and Adam are both helping me out but we need some help to make the image into something that a software program can use to boss around the robot.
We’ve got the hardware set up with the stepper motors and I’ve got the make controller connected to it, but I need to figure out how to get the webcams picture to get changed into the vectors/line art and then get sent out to the motors. If you’ve got some ideas or software suggestions for me, I’d be most grateful. What is your pathway from image to cnc drawbot?
Here’s a little video from the roboteer meetup we had. Jen had fun driving this really cool robot around. It uses wheels that have little wheels on them! Even though it only has 3 wheels it can go any which way. Watch to the end for the robot pov of shoes!
18 thoughts on “Drawing Robot Scribbler Project: Request for Help”
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check this out… http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/
VVV what he said works great . . . i seem to remember while working on artpainter my buddy writing a simple perl script which used autotrace to go through a batch of images and trace their edges into vector data
If I can dig up a functional version i’ll send it your way, as iirc we switched to focusing on direct user input after that, which is a lot easier to capture and be sure of its usability (autotrace did some annoying things like always trace the outside border of the image multiple times, leading to borked up sections when the painting robot selected one of those parts are a brushstroke in its composition)
for Positioning are you just going to use an odometery from each wheel.
cause I forsee much error.
run your bot through a semi complex sequence, and undo it. and see how far off you are from the begining.
if it can’t do this with only a small error.(even an couple of inches would be acceptable) your drawing will suck.
if you need help with taking an image from a webcam and converting. I can help. I do not have alot of spare time, but I can lead you in the right direction.
I have alot of exp. with vision, imaging, 3d scanners and CNC.
I hope you could make a cnc sytem work with that Macbook pro under OS X. Sounds like it will turn out to be a cool project. Those wheels on that robot are omni directional wheels.
is there a way to make the videos on the blog page *not* download automatically? i just looked down and my status bar was squirreling past 5MB, and i didn’t have any intention of watching the video to begin with.
If you enjoyed watching that video, check out http://airtrax.com/ . They sell a forklift with omnidirectional wheels. It’s totally amazing to watch. Makes you wish you needed a forklift for something.
Hey Rodbotic, I’d love to get your help on the webcam conversion. Shoot me an email and let’s do a mind meld.
I have used Corel Draw to convert bitmaps into .dxf files that can be converted to g-code.
2 Questions!
1. I really don’t get what you are trying to make? Can you tell me in simple terms?
2. How do you make or where do you buy those wheels?
Thanks!