Planet Arduino

String art is impressive precisely because it is so difficult to make. Even a simple piece of string art will contain hundreds of feet of thread carefully looped around posts to create areas of varying density that act as shading. Everything from calculating the string’s path to physically laying down the string is a challenge. But after an immense amount of work, Paul MH was able to develop a machine that can produce string art at the touch of a button.

Paul spent years working on this project and it shows. Every step of the process required trial-and-error with different prototypes. To create an art piece, the machine first has to insert dozens or hundreds of nails into the foam bed. That necessitated the invention of a mechanism to feed nails and a neural network to verify that each nail feeds properly. The machine then has to convert an image into a string path, with that path avoiding collisions with nails, looping around nails enough to maintain tension, generating the proper string density, and preventing any tangles.

At its heart, this is a CNC machine that accepts custom g-code generated by Paul’s software. That G-code runs on an Arduino Mega 2560 board, which controls the machine’s motors through a RAMPS 1.4 shield. The concept is similar to a conventional DIY CNC router and the kinematic system is familiar, but this machine needed a multitude of custom parts. Most of those were 3D-printed over many iterations until Paul had a working machine.

As you can see in Paul’s recent video update, the machine can produce very nice string art. It can take any image as input, but high-contrast pictures without a lot of fine detail work the best.

The post This machine automatically threads beautiful string art appeared first on Arduino Blog.

String art is a type of art characterized by an arrangement of thread strung between points to form abstract geometric patterns or representational designs. Thread or wire is wound around a grid of nails hammered onto a wooden board to make unique masterpieces. To expedite the assembly process, London-based studio Laarco has developed a machine capable of ‘printing’ large-scale, gallery-worthy artwork. Autograph uses thousands of nails and a single 500m-long string to construct detailed 40cm x 40cm (16” x 16”) images of celebrities, ranging from David Bowie to Matt Damon to the Beatles. (You can see them all here.)

In terms of hardware, Autograph is equipped with a Raspberry Pi at its core, which sends commands to an Arduino Mega fitted with a 3D printer shield to control the mechanism. The results are absolutely amazing, as you can see in the time-lapse video below.