4 ms·

Sketchy

jszymborski 12y ago
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.
- alilja 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
catmanjan 12y ago
Reminds me of the scene in iRobot where Sonny (the robot) draws the scene from his dream.
nkozyra 12y ago
in any way related to piccolo (which had its v1 'release' today): http://www.piccolo.cc/ http://www.piccolo.cc/ ?
- shurane 12y ago
  Whoa, piccolo seems pretty cool. It would be nice if there were preassembled kits, not too familiar with laser-cutting and the like.
jonahx 12y ago
Obligatory link: http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton
staunch 12y ago
It's a doodling Autopen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen

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.

alilja 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

catmanjan 12y ago

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

nkozyra 12y ago

in any way related to piccolo (which had its v1 'release' today): http://www.piccolo.cc/ http://www.piccolo.cc/ ?

shurane 12y ago
Whoa, piccolo seems pretty cool. It would be nice if there were preassembled kits, not too familiar with laser-cutting and the like.

jonahx 12y ago

Obligatory link: http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton

staunch 12y ago

It's a doodling Autopen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen