

Sketchy - WestCoastJustin
http://www.jarkman.co.uk/catalog/robots/sketchy.htm

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jszymborski
This is ultra-cool!

I wonder why they didn't take advantage of the fact that it could draw a huge
amount of lines in a small amount of time and tweak their edge-detection
algorithm to draw more lines.

Anyway, I'm sure there was very good reason why they haven't... likely the
lines they can draw can't be very fine with the sort of marker they have to
use.

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alilja
The fact that he's just using canny suggests to me that it's just a simple
hack he threw together. There are LOTS of other edge detection algorithms, but
canny is pretty good and so easy to implement that it's the most generally
used. It's not great at faces at a low resolution, but even just a little pre-
processing can make the image better (as he demonstrates towards the bottom of
the page).

~~~
jarkman
Yes, 'simple hack' is definitely one reason. But there are a couple of others:

\- The drawing is sent to the Arduino as a block, then drawn, so it has to fit
in the Arduino's RAM. More complex drawings would require streaming the data
during the drawing. That's totally possible, but it is more work.

\- We quite liked the way these severely-simplified sketches came out. Because
the edge-finding and vector-simplifying code is quite stupid, the best
pictures tend to be the simplest ones, and doing more lines might well just
make the picture more noisy.

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jonahx
Obligatory link:

[http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-
automaton](http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton)

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staunch
It's a doodling Autopen
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen)

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catmanjan
Reminds me of the scene in iRobot where Sonny (the robot) draws the scene from
his dream.

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nkozyra
in any way related to piccolo (which had its v1 'release' today):

[http://www.piccolo.cc/](http://www.piccolo.cc/)

?

~~~
shurane
Whoa, piccolo seems pretty cool. It would be nice if there were preassembled
kits, not too familiar with laser-cutting and the like.

