My previous drawing robots have a very simple mechansim for holding markers—either a series of holes on Minus E or a tube on Scribbot. There was also no lifting mechanism, as my robots’ scribbly drawing style did not require it. This year, inspired by the pen-holding mechansim on pen plotters, I decided to add a similar mechansim to my drawing robot.

Back in 2017, I built my first mobile drawing robot for my undergraduate capstone at NYU Shanghai. Some of my design choices at the time were constrained by the resources and timeline. Now that I am back in school, pursing my master’s degree, I wanted to redesign the robot. My main goal was to make the robot smaller so it becomes more portable. I also thought this would be a nice challenge to practice my CAD skills and deepen my understanding of the electronics.

Inspired by 18th-century automatons such as the writer and the draughtsman by Jaquet-Droz, I wanted to create my own drawing automatons. In particular, I am hoping to build more accessible drawing automatons with a focus on enhanced programmability. As a first step, I decided to design a mechansim for drawing scribbly lines.

Yaogu, also known as the Waist Drum dance, is a traditional folk dance popular in my hometown region of Northern Shaanxi, China. Having lived away from my hometown for over a decade, I wanted to create something that would remind me of my fonding memories there.

I have been making and posting daily creative coding experiments (on my Instagram) for almost 2 years now. One of the mathematical functions that keep coming back is a sine function (such as in the sketch below, which utilizes a combination of sine and cosine functions). As I have been studying fabrication techniques and mechanical movements recently, I had this idea of creating an automaton that visualizes a sine wave.

This week, we are studying the movements of our mechanical toys. The first step we were asked to do was to draw all components in Adobe Illustrator. Since I am fairly familiar with Adobe Illustrator, I challenged myself to practice drawing in Vectorworks, which I have little experience in.

This year, I am starting a new chapter of my life as a graduate student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at Tisch School of Arts, New York University. As I pursue my graduate studies here, I will be sharing lots of updates on this blog. One of the courses that I am taking is called Fabricating Mechanical Automatons *Batteries Not Included.