All posts tagged robot

Zuta – Mini Robot Printer

After raising almost $600,000 on Kickstarter, Zuta Labs is ready to start production on the printer and is accepting pre-orders from non-Kickstarter backers.

The pre-order price — which Zuta Labs says will be lower than the cost at launch — is $199.99. The printer is available in white and black. It comes with a print cartridge that is good for at least 100 pages. Additional cartridges are available for pre-order.

The wireless printer works for about an hour and is rechargeable via micro USB. Users can print on all sizes of paper and it works without drivers and can print from Macs, PCs iOS and Android.

Since its Kickstarter period, Zuta Labs says it has managed to make the printer smaller and faster than it originally anticipated.

The size — just 10.2 centimeters in diameter — is a big selling point for the product. It is aimed at users who only need a printer infrequently and in places where traditional access — think a coffee shop or at a hotel — is not always applicable. The fact that it also works with smartphones and tablets is a big deal, too. More often than not, I wind up needing to print documents from my phone more than my laptop.

Zuta Labs is aiming to have the Zuta Pocket Printer shipped by September 2015. The company is at CES 2015 showing off demos of the device and taking meetings with potential partners.

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Autonomous Drawing Robot by Matthias Dörfelt

Created by Matthias Dörfelt, Mechanical Parts is a series of graphic connectors created by Robo Faber, an autonomous drawing robot determined to reproduce. The robot continuously creates drawings generated using a preset system Matthias developed for Weird Faces and the I Follow flip books. The system works around the idea of thinking how the drawings are created by hand and the same logic designed into the algorithm.

Each connector, or “mechanical part” is entirely random and unique, based on the presets Matthias programmed. In this way the robot can draft an infinite amount of connectors while looking like it is sketching and thinking about a mechanism to reproduce.

I really like that it is in a way a portion of my creative thinking and practice distilled inside of robo faber, frozen in time. Even if I won’t like the drawings thirty years from now, robo faber will still draw and create in a way I though about things now, thirty years earlier.

– Matthias

There is no logic to which connectors go together and the intention was to leave it open to the audience to find the connections that make sense to them. Matthias thinks a perfect fit could be generated at some point, in theory.

Robo Faber is a custom built differential drive robot consisting of two dc motors with encoders at each of the motor shafts. Custom Arduino driver software has been written to approximate the robots position based on the encoders and to allow the robot to follow arbitrary bezier curves. Like in Weird Faces and the I Follow, the drawings are generated using PaperJS.

You can visit the Project Page or visit Matthias Dörfelt‘s website for his work.