There’s a graffiti supplies shop in town, Spectrum Arts, run by this dude called Mark. I approached him about putting a machine in his window – he’s got some covetable glass, and is a nice guy.
It’s been there for a while, but I’ve just got the kit to fit a big fat chalk pen in it. I used this gondola that Stuart Childs designed which did the trick nicely. Thanks to Stuart for this – very timely, and I think I got some great first results out of it too. The slow speed of the vector drawing means that gravity can keep the tip supplied with ink.
Am hoping to formulate a sequence of drawings to go in the window, but would love to see something graffiti based, am thinking of a GML-aware system that can accept tags from all over the internet and mark them out on the glass. For now, it’s just manually controlled, but it communicates using an XBee and has an SD card too, so that’s nice.
Hi Sandy,
What do you think the best way to get a standalone machine up and running. The adafruit SD card module; that touch screen with sd card, something else. I have an Arduino mega. I just might be able to get my machine in a storefront window so i would like it PCless. What do you think is my best option?
Thanks,
Matt
Hey Matt, if it must be completely PC-less, then at the moment you _do_ need some physical controls to calibrate & start (like this one – http://www.polargraph.co.uk/2012/03/polargraph-sd-plus-hoofer-doofer/).
The Spectrum machine doesn’t have any physical controls, but benefits from having a PC nearby in the shop, so the loading, and calibration, and starting can be initiated over the wireless (XBee) link.
If I needed it tomorrow, I would cobble together another one of those “hoofer doofer” machines, maybe with an XBee so it could be hidden away somewhere hard to access (away from prying fingers).
If I needed it next month, I would wait until the polarshields are fully cooked, and use that with the touch-screen. I might also think about using spring-loaded take-up spools instead of counterweights to give people less opportunity to knock it out of alignment.