Curiosity Collective

Etchasketch

Posted by Cefn on 12 October 2005 | 0 Comments

This piece arose (as with so many others) from a discussion in a pub. It concerned how hard it was to get an Etch-a-Sketch to ever draw anything at all, which I suppose was the point of them.

Drawing a diagonal line required years of Karate-Kid-style, Wax-On Wax-Off discipline to get just the angle you wanted. Drawing a circle was reserved for the true Buddha.

So I thought it would be cool to develop a system to make it easier to draw with an Etch-a-Sketch. Turn it back into normal scribbling, with the help of an over-the-top technology, a whole PC to drive an ancient, clumsy, analogue drawing system.

In common with all good ideas, it turns out that it’s been done before, but according to our collective principles originality doesn’t matter a fig, so I’m probably going to do it anyway.

I’d like to have a load of these devices, rather than just the one. Anyone got 20 or so? Know where to get such things? If you see one in a charity shop or a car boot sale, I’m up for parting with cash for these things anyway.

Configurations

Various configurations are possible.

• synchronizing all the different etch-a-sketches in order to have them draw the same image
• them all draw different images
• draw a single large image, like a video wall

The first configuration is the easiest, only requiring two stepper motors, and maybe lots of bicycle chain or something to couple all the wheels of the video wall together. The other configurations are about the same from a complexity point of view, and would need independent stepper controllers for each of the dials (maybe up to 40 independent degrees of freedom!).

Content

As for what you draw, you could have them

• real-time, driven by a graphics pad - direct audience participation
• from archived sketches
• from pictures, and turn them into sketches through some automated process, like the script-fu in gimp

One last thing - how do you shake upside down all the etch-a-sketches in the video wall to erase the image - I think that was how it worked.

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