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Build Your Own Electric Etch-A-Sketch
Posted by
michael
on Sat Jul 17, 2004 07:37 AM
from the reboot-by-shaking dept.
from the reboot-by-shaking dept.
mhaisley writes "Ok, case mods are cool, monitor mods are nifty... but an Electric Etch-a-Sketch beats either. Students at Cornell University built an electronically controlled etch-a-sketch, controllable by a PC mouse. This was part of a group of class final projects featured by their instructor."
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Build Your Own Electric Etch-A-Sketch
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Reminds me of those EtchASketch tech support calls (Score:5, Funny)
Support: Shake it.
Has been done before (Score:5, Funny)
wow... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.deadkitty.org/)
i always saw kids in the commercials w/ these elaborate trucks drawn, i couldn't even make a damn circle
not that im bitter...
Re:wow... (Score:4, Funny)
It's quite easy. You simply rotate the knobs either clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on whether the sine wave sample is above the x axis or below it and at a speed indicated by the value of the y axis. Obviously, the x axis represents time.
The only tricky part is remembering that the left and right knobs aren't ever at the same point in the sine wave so you have to remember that your left hand and right hand might be moving in different directions and at different speeds. At first I founnd that it helped to use a precalculated lookup table but now I can just do the trig calculations on the fly.
Hope that helps!
Fractals are where its at... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be cool (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 07 2004, @09:58PM)
The cheapest item on the BOM would be ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget the etch a sketch. STM project (Score:5, Interesting)
Old mouse designs/upsidedown etch-asketch (Score:2)
(http://www.plocp.com/)
Now its has come full circle and you can use a ball mouse to the 2 paddles..
If only... (Score:1, Funny)
GIF2EAS (Score:2, Interesting)
What the needed to do was
supply a image as input
and have the thing
A) Translate it to b&w
B) Have the EAS automatically draw it
Kind of like the novelty of
translating an image to
ascii
Cheers,
--The Dude
The original plotter (Score:1)
Re:The original plotter (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.animats.com)
There was the Iconarama, which was an Etch-A-Sketch like device attached to a projector. This was the first large-screen computer controlled display, and was used by NORAD in the 1950s. The device scratched transparent areas onto a slide, projecting icons (usually aircraft tracks) on a screen. When the screen became too cluttered, a slide changer loaded a new blank slide. Two complete systems aimed at the same screen were used, to avoid a blank period during slide change and redraw and to provide redundancy.
The Iconarama was one of a long series of early military attempts to build large-screen displays. There were wall-sized plotters. CRT/film/photo processor/projector combinations. The Eidophor oil-film projector. [earlytelevision.org]
Eidophor technology first appeared in 1943, and there are still a few units in use. No other technology until DLP could reach the 4000 lumen light level of an Eidophor unit.
Now this is... (Score:2)
(http://hd.blogdns.org:3000/)
I once thought about building a plotter with a mate of mine, maybe I'll bring the idea back up again...
It's missing a way to erase it... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.seanadams.com/)
I used a big servo (made for a remote controlled boat) to flip it over. Also a solenoid to lock the screen in the vertical position so that the servo/solenoid only need to be energized while the screen is being shaken.
A system admin's dream item... (Score:2)
I'd want to buy one for every Pointy-Haired Boss I've had to help with their computer...
Direct X support? (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday October 25 2004, @09:28AM)
the art of motion control (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.mysteryexperience.com/)
I think the most interesting thing here is the wide range of projects of their class page [cornell.edu] and how they have come up with inventive ways of using microcontrollers (sure some of them aren't new but that doesn't mean they aren't cool work for a class of students).
But if you think this is cool then you should check out the work of Bruce Shapiro [taomc.com]. He's got a stepper motor controlled Etch a Sketch, but that's only the begining. How about a home built two axis plasma cutter [taomc.com], or a an old dental mill [taomc.com] that turns 2d pictures into 3d sculptures.
And yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not Quite Original (Score:1)
A bit underwhelming.... (Score:3, Informative)
Why was a microcontroller even NEEDED here? Rewiring the mouse to provide the raw X and Y encoder wheel pulses, and applying them right to the stepper drivers would give substantially the same results without the MCU and all the programming. If the stepper drivers need step and direction signals rather than quadrature pulse trains, run the encoder signals through one of the LSI/CSI encoder interface chips to get whatever you want without writing code or burning it onto a chip. A programmable solution for something this simple seems like complexity for complexity's sake...
Niftyness^2 (Score:1)
A friend of mine also built one (Score:1)
check this out (Score:1, Informative)
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/Fi
Check out the rest of the projects students in this class have made: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/Fi
Keep in mind that students in ece476 only have about a month to do their final project and that is on top of all their other classes' final projects.
Had one over 30 years ago. (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 17 2002, @10:28AM)
It was called an X-Y plotter [hp.com].
I've done this too. (Score:1)
Geez, I should have patented it. (Score:2)
(http://russnelson.com/)
-russ
Re:Cool? (Score:1)
(http://ki4bbo.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday July 18 2004, @06:59PM)
Re:COOOOL (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Final Year Project?!? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 07 2004, @09:58PM)
Re:Sorry, but this has been done before... (Score:2)
And good for them. You are saying that everything done by one generation is -- done -- and nobody in the future should try it also? Besides, reinventing the (insert interesting invention here) is very educational.
Re:Sorry, but this has been done before... (Score:1)
It was funny to read about how they discovered the "Phenomon" that if you continually turn an Etch-A-Sketch knob in one direction, it never actually stops. Something every kid figures out right away. They used this "Feature" for reseting the stylus in the center of the screen.
Re:Sorry, but this has been done before... (Score:2)
(http://www.chl-tx.com/ | Last Journal: Friday April 20 2007, @08:06AM)
Re:Ethical? (Score:1)
Re:Sorry, but this has been done before... (Score:1)
Re:COOOOL (Score:3, Informative)
This is something students have probably done for such projects for 15 years.
Re:Before their time (Score:2)
(http://www.tarunz.org/~vassilii/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 20 2004, @03:17PM)
Re:Department of Redundancy Department (Score:2, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday November 14 2003, @03:56PM)
Inside the mouse is a ball driving two optical encoders: one for X, one for Y, mechanically placed 90 degrees apart.
The optical disks and detector are made in such a manner as to produce a quadrature encoded output.
With very minimal "glue logic", these signals could be changed to the quadrature encoded drive signals required by a stepper motor.
This would have eliminated the whole processor.
But, they used a roundabout way of doing it.
I'll often do things for my own edification that are not optimal just to see how things work.
In this case, the students got to experience working with the AVR compiler, programming in machine code, and real-world interface design, so I won't bang on them for not doing it in such a way I would have if I were gonna make a million of 'em.
Now, if I had found out that they were just drawing lines on the CRT screen, I would have posted a very vile commentary on the state of what is passing for education these days. What I saw looked appropriate to me for a class project for BSEE.
Just for funsies, my final project in College back in the early 70's was building my own oscilloscope from scratch. I thought I was gonna get really good bandwidth because I was using 45MHz IF tubes from television receivers as my CRT drive. Got my design finished... Surprise! I got 10KHz! Well, so much for my rude awakening to plate resistance and capacitive loads... but the professor gave me full credit anyway because I offered the correct explanation of why I didn't get the response I expected.
Done at U. of Delaware also (Score:3, Informative)
Cornell has turned itself into a Microsoft shop, so it's appropriate that they're all excited about something that others did years before.
Re:It's just a plotter... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday January 15 2004, @08:15AM)
Sorry, it just reminded me of the English rhyme about Guy Fawkes [guy-fawkes.com] attempting to blow up parliament:
Remember, remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.