Posts with «light-painting» label

Light painting with a CNC router

Maker Jeremy S. Cook has experimented with both CNC machinery and light painting in the past, and decided to combine these two skills into a new artistic device. 

His setup uses a web app found here to program a CNC router as a sort of dot matrix printer. But instead of a pen, pencil, brush or other marking utensil, it uses a button as an input to the onboard Arduino Nano when pressed to the router’s surface.

From this input, the Arduino then commands a diffused RGB LED to “mark” the surface with light, painting an image on the camera’s exposed sensor. 

Code and print files are are available on GitHub if you’d like to try your own light art experiments!

Arduino Blog 06 Mar 18:10
ar(t)duino  arduino  cnc light painting  featured  light-painting  nano  

Light painting rig is a masterpiece of artistic hardware hacking

Light painting is an art form where dark areas are selectively lit to form interesting effects. While normally a manual operation, Josh Sheldon has come up with a rig to automate and enhance the process. The results are nothing short of spectacular, producing not static images, but astonishing animated light displays.

His device resembles a 3D printer made out of aluminum extrusion. X,Y, and Z axes are controlled by a series of stepper motors, but it uses a point of controlled light instead of melted plastic to form shapes. 

Light animations are set up in Blender, and a hardware and software toolchain including Processing, an Arduino Mega, and a Dragonframe module are implemented for control.

Check out the whole story in the video below, or see code/build documentation are available on GitHub.

Arduino Blog 30 Jul 22:24
animated light displays  arduino  featured  light painting machine  light-painting  mega