Drawbot creates art at the push of a button

Donald Bell | Jul 03, 2009

The AS220 Drawbot kit includes a laser-cut wooden box, engraved with the same pattern the Drawbot is programmed to create. (Credit: AS220)

I 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. To keep things interesting, the folks at Rhode Island's AS220 Labs art space have created a drawing robot (Drawbot, for short) 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 12 inches (0.3m) wide to more than 4 feet (1.22m). The Drawbot kit comes mostly pre-assembled with no soldering required, and runs US$150. 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 onto 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.