Once again, the Polargraph Pro is featured as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival’s Making It touring exhibit, stationed until the 19th of April 2015 in Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre down the road in Leith.

Tricking the machine with smartphones

I was a bit nervous about having the machine presented in such a uncontrolled environment (it was in the National Museum last year), but it’s been remarkably low-maintenance during it’s first week.

Some better than others

For this year’s outing, there were a very small number of changes to the firmware, mainly to add a feature to support a button and an indicator LED on the circuitboard that is controllable via commands, and used to signal to the Science Communicators that it needs it’s paper changed.

The changes to the Polarweb controller software are a little deeper, and there’s now a visualisation video stream published to a browser so you can see what the machine sees, and what processing it’s doing. Worked pretty well, but taxed the original laptop a bit much (it was an Atom), so the machine has been upgraded.

Other upgrades:

• Minimum face size, so only people close-up get recognised and drawn
• Path sorting to make for more efficient drawing (I hope to pull this work into the general Polargraph Controller some time soon)
• Except for changing the paper, there is no manual intervention required during operation
• Tracing controls are available in the interface to change posterisation levels, minimum path length, maximum path count and smoothing
• The pen lift servo wire is routed more neatly, and uses spring-loaded retractable cable spools rather than the coiled cable that got stuck all the time
• Drawing sequence can now fixed bottom-to-top so that pictures can be cut out and taken home as soon as they are drawn