Art – Marginally Clever Robots

Friday Facts 18: New Makelangelo generators

2023-09-22 Dan

The Makelangelo plotters software is always getting improvements and today I’d like to share some of the latest with you. As of today the last official release of Makelangelo Software is 7.37. But did you know that exciting work is always going on in the discussion group? Hot new stuff is being added all the time. We’re up to version 7.44. Here’s a list of changes.

Firmware can now be updated from every platform
Added image intensity to height converter
Added Quadtree-like instant filter
Added Circular mazes
Added Honeycomb mazes
Added more Truchet Tiles
Misc other fixes

Firmware can now be updated from every platform

OSX proved to be quite challenging. But it was worth it if it makes everyone’s life easier going forward. Firmware changes are rare and now they are that much less painful. So now when the code in the brain of the robot is changed you won’t have to jump through a lot of hoops. Instead you can use File > Update firmware and follow the prompts.

Added image intensity to height converter

The change in height of each line is affected by the intensity of the underlying image. Line spacing and line offset are adjustable from the menus.

Added Quadtree-like instant filter

Contributed by itsMohammedThaier. Starting from the whole picture, divide the rectangle in 4 quadrants. if the chnage in color over a quadrant is too much, split this quadrant and repeat.

Added Circular mazes

What’s not to love? Being randomly generated from a depth-first search, I’m pretty sure there are sometimes two ways to solve each maze.

Added Honeycomb mazes

Would you believe all well-formed mazes are generated the same? The difference is in how the walls are drawn.

Added more Truchet Tiles

Orthogonal, Diagonal, and Curved. You can mix and match them together!

And more!

Better drawing of counterweights and belts
Added timestamps to Marlin conversation
Added more unit tests for unused translations and missing translations
Internally merged shared code for Vornoi diagrams
Internally merged shared code for Truchet tiles
Internally merged shared code for Mazes

Final thoughts

So if any of that seems interesting to you, check it out in the nightly builds.

Thank you to everyone who donated to support the software development. Your donations keep me in beer, and beer keeps me at Ballmer peak.

Discuss this and anything else plotter related on our Discord.

Art Tutorials

Masked and Weighted Truchet Tiles in Processing

2020-06-14 Dan

I first saw this effect used with an image of Alan Turing and the word CODE superimposed. It was many months before several disparate ideas came together and I finally rediscovered how to generate these kinds of pictures. Here now I’ll show you how I built up the Processing code to do the same.

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Art Makelangelo

Stippling an image with Wang Tiles

2019-12-18 Dan

This is a big interest of mine because of my work on the Makelangelo Software. The software converts a photo to lines by starting with Stippling, where dots are put on the picture in a meaningful way. Everything that flows from there starts with good stippling. Wang Tiles are the current best method, prove me wrong.

I don’t have a way to make wang tiles as described in this video yet. If I had a set I’m confident I could do the rest in short order.

Art Makelangelo News

Five ways to use your Makelangelo art robot for fun and profit

2019-12-04 Dan

Art

KUKA KR180 from Thingiverse, fixed

2012-12-13 Dan

I’m slugging my way through the end of a project and I needed something to take my mind off it for a bit so I found my first vanity 3D print – a KUKA KR180 robot arm. This scale model is fully articulated. I used an M3 screw with the head cut off to hold the wrist onto the elbow without sacrificing movement. You can get all the files on thingiverse but I found I needed to fix a number of broken meshes. To save you time, here are all the files for KUKA KR180 including the fixes. A couple more M3s will hold the rest of the parts together and I used some hot glue to hold the two halves of the humerus together. I really find this model inspiring, I hope one day soon to build my own.