Freehand Drawings Contest!

Things You've Made
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I am going to be showing off my portable MPCNC and Wireless Pendant at the Dublin Maker fair (https://dublinmaker.ie) at the end of August. I want to avoid kids losing their fingers, so I decided to let them try freehand drawing with the pendant’s joystick, rather than cutting wood. I have tuned up the motion algorithm pretty well, and still, this was about the best I could do. I printed a nice pen holder out of flex filament, in two parts glued together. It is a drum with holes in the top and bottom that fit sharpies tightly. The drum’s vertical flex is the right amount of pressure for the pen tip; it has virtually no flex horizontally.

I thought it would be fun for all you artists out there to make a freehand drawing with your CNC and post it here. Then we can vote on the winner. I will set the deadline to Sept. 30th.

Here’s my design, for the Boomers:

Freehand MPCNC Art

And a closeup of the pen holder:
Flex TPU hollow drum pen holder

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For those who care about such things, movement speed (feed rate) is proportional to the square of the joystick deflection, (fitted to a parabolic function). I found the best responsiveness with a planner buffer setting of 5 little jogs, each about 40ms minimum. The dead zone in the middle (so it stops moving if you let go of the joystick) is about 1٪ of the full deflection.

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Now I really need to finish my pendant!

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Just flicking through the pictures from last year - looks like a great event and I like that it’s so kid focused and free too!

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This is like an electric etch-a-sketch, but with a joystick… very cool!

This has me thinking now. One could covert to zen by putting a magnet on the core and draw sand pics or maybe a claw and see if they could pick up something. So many possibilities.

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Made me wonder how could you track the motion of a pen tip so you sketch on paper and the machine replicates it like a digital pantograph…

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This is amazing! We had a different approach carved out last year, I don’t remember the thread right now. It was based on a simple web pages that sent drawings from a simple drawing tool to through web serial (I think??). It worked, but was a little clunky. This is as hands on as you can get! Perfect for as a showcase at festivals and faires.

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There is a ZenXY sand pattern kit here at V1E. I think anyone who wants to use theirs to do a freehand sand drawing shoul also enter this contest!

And I love the over-engineered pantograph idea, too!

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Please consider making a topic for the Dublin Maker fair, I hope you and any other community members that go will document things. I wish I knew this one was at the end of August when I first started thinking about a pre-visit to SMRRF. I might’ve tried to combine both this and my pre-visit.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to these drawings and if you have an event topic.

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Here you go!

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I guess i never knew you were in ireland! I had always wanted to go there. I cannot trace my lineage now but my last name “riley” is from ireland, my great granddad or great great came from ireland. My grandma told me a lil before her passing, so i never learned too much about it!!

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