01/11/2012

Perpetual Energy Wasting Machine by Niklas Roy



Low-Tech Factory by ECAL



INTERACTIVE CONSTRUCTION: INTERACTIVE FABRICATION OF FUNCTIONAL MECHANICAL DEVICES by Stefanie Mueller, Pedro Lopes and Patrick Baudisch



Figure 1: (a) Constructable users interact by drafting directly on the workpiece with hand-held lasers. (b) Here the user sketches a finger joint across two objects (c) The system responds by cutting the desired joint using the cutting laser. (d) Constructable allows creating precise & functional mechanical objects, such as this simple motorized vehicle.


When you take out a pen tool (a normal laser pointer) an arduino MEGA microcontroller detects that the pen was taken out. While you draw, an over head camera tracks the red laser pointer dot using a custom color tracker implemented in OpenCV in C++. The path is smoothed using a Kalman Filter and converted into the coordinates of the laser cutter space and then the sketch that you made is vectorized and beautified. The sketch is converted into perfect lines using PaleoSketch (open source library) and generates smoothed shapes. The final sketch is sent to an OpenDraw document (open office APIl) using a custom OSC to OpenDraw java server team implemented. Lastly, the documented is printed using a robot program (java, open source libs) that controls the operating system pointer and clicks on “print” on the laser cutter software.