Digitized Doodle Dome
It's a sphere drawing etcha-sketch-style drawing machine using PICaxe microcontrollers and old floppy drive steppers. Wow!
The Doodle Dome was a toy made by Tyco in the early 1990's. It is basically an Etch-A-Sketch type deal, except that instead of a flat rectangle, it is (most of) a sphere. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, there are two knobs that move a little pointer around a drawing surface, and it scrapes some silver dust-like stuff off to draw a picture. Outside of the shape, the other notable difference is that there is a little lever that pulls the drawing point off of the surface, so the picture can have gaps in it, instead of being all connected by a line.
For no particular reason, this spring I rigged one up with motors and a computer interface, to see if I could get it to draw arbitrary pictures. I got the whole thing about 95% done back in April, then last week I finally finished it up and took some pictures. - Link (Thanks Jay)
[Read this article] [Comment on this article] Source: MAKE Magazine