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Build Your Own Electric Etch-A-Sketch
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."
User: My Etch A Sketch has crashed what should I do?
Support: Shake it.
After a while the lines start to stick a little, and you get the old faded lines all over the screen. This reminds me of the old monitors that the image got burned in. Do you think they fixed this problem?
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
It is called photoshop.
maybe now i could actually draw a circle on the freaking thing
i always saw kids in the commercials w/ these elaborate trucks drawn, i couldn't even make a damn circle
not that im bitter...
...and that's all there is to it.
I think they should just drop the mouse, hook it up to a computer and draw fractals. That would be a really cool project and it would make some pretty cool results.
Photoshop had color!
I are winner
yes it is cool :) I mean you try to make something like that, think of the programing that went into turning the motors just the right amount in just the right direction.. I am sure you couldn't even make anything half as cool as that :)
_____
Josh Powell - www.ki4bbo.org
If you could use the expandable shapes like the circles and rectangles and stuff in most paint programs and the machine would just make it?
I are winner
They should add another motor that shakes it and connect that to a "reset" button.
The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey
...the Etch-a-Sketch itself (yeah, yeah, I know they got it for free but you could source one for a dollar). I am impressed with this project as a teaching aid. Combines a whole lot slew of concepts in one fun project! So what if it isnt practical - technlogia gratia artis.
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
A class a few years earlier built an scanning tunneling microscope. http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/Fin alProjects/s2002/sm242/index.htm
If its "very simple" then I would love to see you make one... I still think its neat :)
_____
Josh Powell - www.ki4bbo.org
I have an old mouse with instead of a ball it it had two "paddles" like the contols of an etch-a-sketch. It worked ok, but the ball worked much better.
Now its has come full circle and you can use a ball mouse to the 2 paddles..
They could hook the thing up to my video card and have it redraw 60 times a second, I'd have a cheap monitor!
Worst. Comment. Ever.
My "friend" who went to a community college built an LED display that just counts in binary for his FYP....Pathetic
I are winner
Hey There,
... ... ...
... ... ;)
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
I don't have any references, but I remember hearing that the very first computer controlled plotter was made from an Etch-A-Sketch.
User: My Etch A Sketch has crashed what should I do?
Support: Shake it.
* pause * rattle *
User: That didnt fix it. I think I spoiled my Etch A Sketch for good!
Support: May I have your name sir?
User: Al Gore
Support: Have a nice day! Bye!
* click *
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
...what I read slashdot for. Here's an interesting project that will hopefully cause ideas to spring up in my head but most importantly will encourage me to actually get off my ass and do something like this.
I once thought about building a plotter with a mate of mine, maybe I'll bring the idea back up again...
Well.... In the poor guy's defense, I know I couldn't have built an LED that counted in binary at the end of my second year of school. I assume that his community college only counts to 10 like most others.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
I built one of these years ago... the thing mine had that theirs is missing is some way to flip it over to erase it.
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.
I thought the idea was great, if they could work a large wooden beaver into the design.
No really, if they could build some mouse-jigs they could use the modified Electr-O-Sketch to design loom components. Soon they'd innovate Punchcards, then the Difference Engine - and finally the mouse.
With recent advances in transistors and microprocessors they'd soon be able to design childrens toys without the need of the highly inefficient clay tablet
I predict a bright future for this group of stalwart free thinkers!
Stuff that matters.
A working electronically controlled EAS may be a product that people would want to buy.....
I'd want to buy one for every Pointy-Haired Boss I've had to help with their computer...
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
A pen up/down control would be nice. Do they make D size Etch-A-Scketches?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
An LED that counts in binary isn't hard -- if you use a flasher LED: 0 1 0 1 0 ...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Imagine, a 3d engine which can render 20 polygons a minute!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
I think the most interesting thing here is the wide range of projects of their class page 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. 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, or a an old dental mill that turns 2d pictures into 3d sculptures.
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense. - Robert A. Heinlein
Way to go, kids, you re-invented the fucking wheel!!!
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.
technologia gratia artis
Technology for the sake of art huh? What like a printer?
I think you mean 'technologia gratia technologiae' technology for technology's sake.
Off topic! Ha, I wrote this on an etch-a-sketch!
... articles about nifty microcontroller projects like the laser-based Iridium flare tracker get rejected. Go figure.
Ah, no. They removed the computer from the picture and hooked up simply a mouse. Yes, there is an MCU for driving the motors, but it is a very good project for figuring out timings/electrical interfaces.
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.
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"
I recall seeing this around 1977 in Byte Magazine. I was on a graphics project for a military contractor at the time, and we submitted this to my supervisor as a joke. He thought it was funny, but *his* boss didn't...
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Not to rain on anyone's parade, but this isn't exactly novel or complicated. Many undergrad engineering programs have a similar project. For instance, the University of Delaware (my school) assigned such a project as part of a sophomore level course in microprocessors. And that was two years ago.
Is that all there is to it? A mouse moving the stylus of an etch-a-sketch? Now if it incorporated a "drag and drop" or "selective erase" feature, it might be interesting. As it is, this would make a neat high school science fair project, but a final project for an EE degree?
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...
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Is it just me, or does anyone else find it deeply impressive that Cornell University addresses ethics with regard to science/engineering? In a world where so many geeks just build anything they're tasked with building, it's nice to know that there are some classic academics, educators, scientists and students up in Ithaca who give a damn about this world and their impact on it.
Creative Computing maybe? I remember the pix ... seems to me the sample plot was a parabola =p
It's only a mater of time until we get a case mod based on this kind of rig. Looking at my computer's glowing inards is getting old. But if I could rig an EAS to the Mobo and write a controller that would randomly draw new patterns. That would be cool.
Laziness is a virtue, anyone who bothers to tell you otherwise, is clearly lacking it.
A friend of mine also built one in college (Carl R.) for his EE project. That was around 1991-1992. I don't remember the interface, but it might have been a joystick.
When I took a class on controls a few years ago there was a class project you had to do, build something that you would control. Could be anything. One of the things the prof wouldn't let us do is this. It had been done so many times before and had a couple etch-a-sketches sitting in the cabinent with motors allready on them.
This is something students have probably done for such projects for 15 years.
But the ones who entered science fairs tended to be, I guess.
FWIW, I went to a Vo-Tech HS, and studied electronics technology. Myself and another student made a project out of a child's toy robotic arm (IIRC it was called an "armitron") that we rigged up with a half-dozen DC motors and controlled via the parallel port on a ZX81. Programmed in BASIC to execute simple moves. This would have been during the junior year of HS.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Is it patentable once they put the know-how into the public domain by publishing on the website (prior art aside)?
VKh
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.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Often, geeks are they only people qualified to decise whether something should be built. Witness the recent retardedness in the UK about nanotechnology after Prince Charles said a bunch of bullshit about it.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
There are far more impressive projects that students in this class have made:n alProjects/s2004/aeh28/Website/index.htm
n alProjects/
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.
Cornell has turned itself into a Microsoft shop, so it's appropriate that they're all excited about something that others did years before.
Sorry, it just reminded me of the English rhyme about Guy Fawkes attempting to blow up parliament:
Remember, remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
It was called an X-Y plotter.
I guess there are several perspectives for viewing this project.
When I saw it, I did not see it much as a production plan for making the device, as much as I saw it as a platform they had constructed to demonstrate their ability to serially communicate to a mouse, process the info with a microcontroller, then drive motors based on the result. An exercise in interfacing.
I also consider that AVR processors are quite cheap, damn near cheap as a couple of glue logic chips. The programming is a one-time effort, and the use of as many off-the-shelf commodity items, such as the mouse, AVR processor, motor driver chips, etc, shove quite a bit of R&D costs away. As you know, the very chip in the mouse that reads the quadrature encoded X-Y wheels and prepares the serial info stream for the PC is also a microcontroller.
Their implementation indeed used two microcontrollers, when in reality none at all were needed. But then, reliability of AVR processors is hardly questionable ( as I have yet to see one fail ).
Their design can be viewed as redundant, but knowing what I do about the elemental parts of the design, for commercial use, I would probably come up with something very similar. I would want my customer to be able to walk into his local "Radio Shack" and buy spare parts should something break. If I made attempts to redesign a standard mouse, I could easily create a lot of chaos in the supply chain.
From my chair, I would have given them an A. I would have also considered it good for a Master's project if they threw in the control systems math for matching the controller to the stepper motor... as the motor and load have inertia - and optimizing it for fastest error-free operation would require implementation of some DSP in the processor.
However I certainly see your viewpoint - its the same as mine when I was working in aerospace - as simplicity, reliability, and power consumption were our prime design objectives. Until Goldin and his team of tie-guys managementized the industry, elegance of design was top dog.
I didn't survive when the aerospace firm I worked for managementized - as I stood up for what I believed - and quickly got labeled as an uncooperative member of the team. What they were asking me to do involved asking me to give up my computer and circuit simulator which I understood intimately, and in its place they were demanding I use some proprietary piece of stuff I did not understand... and thinking I could still produce good design using it with even faster time frames, as well as asking me to take on several things at once. Damm, my own OS is still God's Original Wet-Ware version 1.0 (Homo Sapiens). There are only so many things I can consider at a time. Does one tell the tie-guy the honest truth and lose one's job, or be a nice subordinate little minion and hope for the best, hoping something where I do not have twenty years worth of experience backing up my judgment will work?
I certainly understand about the guys who can't find their ass with both hands and a GPS... the problem is that they have gone beyond engineering and often become an engineer's boss.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I recently (may 2004) graduated from the University of Colorado with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering. One of my three big projects was a computer-controlled etch-a-sketch. The class was focused on real-time embedded projects using VxWorks. We used a video capture card and an x86 based VxWorks system to do line following on a captured drawing. (With the goal real time capture and drawing no time to tweak). When we started we thought we were original, oh well. It sure was a sight to see it trace out the drawing (last official act for my undergraduate degree). My professor took digital video of it working, and I hoped it was online but alas no. Why am I making the post? Just to throw in my experience and say this kind of activity is not easy but ultimately is fun.
I built one of these back 1978. Yes, virginia, they had etch-a-sketches back then. And stepping motors. Yes, and even personal computers. I remember when we added 4KB of RAM, for a total of 24K! You could do anything in 24K! Mu-hahahahahaha!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
No. The point of education is NOT to re-invent, but to build upon what came before.
Reinventing is merely another form of rote. That isn't learning, that is merely the act of repetition.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Reinventing is merely another form of rote. That isn't learning, that is merely the act of repetition.
Only the physical result is the repetition. The work in reinventing is entirely original within the mind(s) of those undertaking it. It is not even vaguely related to rote-learning.