Making Etch-a-Sketch Art With Python #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
Use a Raspberry Pi to create incredible Etch-a-Sketch art! From the blog Sunny Days:
The etch-a-sketch is one of the most frustrating drawing toys from childhood. Can we combine some code and motors to make this toy produce nice pictures?
The Etch-A-Sketch was released by The Ohio Art Company in 1960. Ever since then, it’s been a staple toy in homes, daycares, waiting rooms and schools – over 100 million have been sold worldwide. It was even a big enough deal to be a character in Toy Story 1 and 2!
The popularity of the device is sort of interesting because it has lots of annoying problems:
knobs only move the cursor up/down/left/right. Diagonals and curves require a steady precision that most children 3+ simply don’t have.
you can’t draw two objects that are not connected.
No ability to undo small mistakes. If you want to undo something you’ll have to redo your whole masterpiece.
The Plan
Write a program that uses some motors to draw nice pictures on an etch-a-sketch. For the reasons above, recreating pictures by hand is tedious and extremely difficult. My hope was to get to a point where my program could draw things better than I could. I’ve always wanted to learn more about how to use hardware with python so I was pretty excited to start this one.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!