ETCH A SKETCH
A Supersized Etch A Sketch
For this final project from my designing product interactions class, we decided to take a familiar product and reimagine how we interact with it.
My team chose the Etch A Sketch, a toy most people are familiar with, and scaled it up to the size of a coffee table so the user would have a full body experience interacting with the product.
Production
There were two main parts to this project, the CNC system that controls the marble, and the sweeping mechanism that erases the drawing. The whole system is encased in a plywood Etch-A-Sketch with rounded corners made by cutting slits in the wood.
There were several parts to this project: the outer shell made of plywood, the CNC system that controls the marble, and the sweeping mechanism that erases the drawing.
The marble is magnetically attached to a CNC gantry. The gantry system was developed by DIY Machines', and it is run by an Arduino with a CNC shield. In order to control the gantry we sent GCode commands directly over serial to the Arduino.
There is a second Arduino that parses the encoder positions of the knobs and generates the appropriate GCode to send to the gantry. This Arduino then sends the commands over serial to the CNC controller.
There were several parts to this project: the outer shell made of plywood, the CNC system that controls the marble, and the sweeping mechanism that erases the drawing.
The clearing mechanism consists of a wide brush attached to a timing belt that sweeps the brush across the sand. The motion is controlled by a third Arduino that is reading an accelerometer to detect a shake.
Detailed Views
KNOB
CONTROL
SAND
ETCH
SHAKE
ERASE
A Supersized Etch A Sketch
For this final project from my designing product interactions class, we decided to take a familiar product and reimagine how we interact with it.
My team chose the Etch A Sketch, a toy most people are familiar with, and scaled it up to the size of a coffee table so the user would have a full body experience interacting with the product.
Production
There were several parts to this project: the outer shell made of plywood, the CNC system that controls the marble, and the sweeping mechanism that erases the drawing.
The marble is magnetically attached to a CNC gantry. The gantry system was developed by DIY Machines', and it is run by an Arduino with a CNC shield. In order to control the gantry we sent GCode commands directly over serial to the Arduino.
There were several parts to this project: the outer shell made of plywood, the CNC system that controls the marble, and the sweeping mechanism that erases the drawing.
The clearing mechanism consists of a wide brush attached to a timing belt that sweeps the brush across the sand. The motion is controlled by a third Arduino that is reading an accelerometer to detect a shake.