I loved his simple, elegant fishing line PlotterBot — that made expressive illustrations of the Tardis from Doctor Who, Nikola Tesla, and other images — and also loved that his daughter, TinkerGirl, had her own booth display of Spinning Robot Drawings at the table next to him.
While it might be true that I’m obsessed with pen plotters and drawbots of all kinds so they had me from the get-go, spending time chatting with the two of them back and forth about their passion for creating robots to create art with them — and watching the excitement TinkerGirl communicated to visitors to her part of the display — touched my heart and was one of my favorite authentic maker experiences at the Faire this year.
A PlotterBot or DrawBot is a robot that can draw really large mural sized images. It is easy and cheap to build using very common parts and tools. (Read more about PlotterBot.)
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.