Drawbot makes better art than useless fleshbag humans

By Donald Bell on 02 July 2009, 11:09am

We don't care how much money you spend on a piece of hoity-toity artwork -- eventually you're going to get sick of looking at it. We all know what keeps things interesting: robots. The chaps at Rhode Island's AS220 Labs art space know this better than most and have created a drawing robot -- a Drawbot, if you will -- that can whip up a new work of art at the push of a button.

The AS220 Drawbot kit includes two wall-mountable DC motors, two string spools, a pen clip and a controller board built around a Sanguino microcontroller. The whole kit comes inside a laser-cut wooden box engraved with the mandala pattern that comes pre-programmed on the Drawbot.

A small knob located on the controller board lets you control the scale of the drawing, ranging from 30cm wide to more than a metre. The Drawbot kit comes mostly pre-assembled with no soldering required, and will set you back $150 (£90). Currently, AS220 only has four Drawbots on hand.

No programming skills are required to make the Drawbot work out of the box, but tinkerers are encouraged to load their own patterns and code on to the board, which can also interface with the popular, open-source Arduino platform. A video of an early version of the AS220 Drawbot can be seen below.