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For Posterity

The first successful prototype of PewtyBot.

Philip from Germany got in touch to tell me about a cool project he had seen that involved photoluminescent paper. He thought maybe PlottyBot could so something with it, and maybe it could, but not fast enough I thought. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it though, with the PlottyBot software stack, but a different machine. I love that people get in touch to show me cool things. I’ve been working on plotters for years now, and in some sense it felt like I had turned every stone. Out of nowhere Philip got in touch and steered me toward a whole new area of exploration. Of course one can buy glow-in-the-dark paper, of course I can shoot lasers at it, of course all the algorithms I’ve been working on these past years lend themselves to this new endeavor. Well, with some tweaking :).

It was a real struggle to get Trinamic drivers working on a Pi, but I wanted to step up my motor stepping game. Once I figured it out, holy shit do they work! There’s much else to talk about here, but this isn’t the point of this post, I just want to capture the miletone that is shooting lasers super fast at photoluminescent paper. I still haven’t wrapped my mind around what this all means.

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Circles

This one is very abstract except when viewed from a good distance it comes together.

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Runestone of Memory

I often contact artists to see if they’d like to do something public on the big plotter, and I’m often met with silence :). Sometimes though, I meet the rare characters who are completely fine doing something cool just because it’s cool, new, and takes their art in another dimension, oh and by the way there’s $0 to be made for either of us. I appreciate disinterested people, and Irish artist Patrick Boullier is such a person. He kindly provided a high resolution scan of his amazing piece: Runestone of Memory so I could try to turn that into penstrokes for the giant plotter. After several trials and help from Vectorizer.ai (top of the line for SVG tracing), I got somewhere we both felt was good, and so it ran on the big plotter for a week.

As is routine, the public reveal was preceded by several smaller scale trials.

This is an awesome piece on Norse mythology riddled with symbolism. I highly recommend reading the explanation of some of it (scroll down some).

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Quaint Booth

We finally have the quaintest place to eat and hang out in the kitchen. It has the intimacy of a restaurant booth, and we’re surrounded by windows showing nature.

It’s not completely finished, but it’s usable. We still need to come up with a table which embraces the peculiar shapes of this space.