Gocupi is a portable drawbot driven by a raspberry pi. It's like a modern-day Etch A Sketch! Kickstarter Funded! Open source!
Sold By Maker BunkerThis product is no longer available for sale.
The seller may be offering an improved version or it may be hanging out on the beach, enjoying the retired life.
What does this package include? (1) Raspberry Pi (1) gocupi Main Board (1) 3D Printed Parts (motor mounts & gondola) (1) 8GB SD card (with Raspbian image flashed and gocupi software installed) (2) E…
Read More…More commonly referred to as a ‘drawbot’ or ‘polargraph’, the gocupi is a robot that suspends a pen or marker between two stepper motors and draws on a vertical surface. Each stepper motor has a spool attached to it’s shaft which is wound with a thin braided line, and these spools move simultaneously to control the position of the pen that hangs between them.
The positioning is all accomplished by using a polar coordinate for each point on a path for each stepper motor. To determine how the pen should move from one point to the next the gocupi calculates the velocity and acceleration based on a number of factors, the most notably being the position on the drawing surface. The gocupi knows lines near the edge of the page drawn at high speed have a tendency to produce an unintended line or may cause the pen to bounce off of the surface creating dots and dashes instead of a line. This is all taken into consideration for each transition of the pen from on point on a path to the next. To further put that process into perspective, it is not uncommon for a drawing to consists of 800,000 points (or more) and take 45 minutes to an hour for the gocupi to draw.
Ok... But what does it all mean? this all sounds uber “math-y” and that turns me off… but just out of curiosity, how does one interact with this robot called gocupi?
Once you cool your jets it’s quite easy to get accustomed to the interface and basic commands. The user defines a variable or set of variables to be input into one of the available commands within the gocupi source. For example: You could tell the gocupi to draw a spiral with an initial radius of 100 millimeters and each following revolution of the spiral to have a radius 3 millimeters shorter than the previous, and continue this pattern until the pen reaches the center of the spiral by using a command as simple as “spiral 100 3″
Well great, now we can draw circles… But what about that Marilyn Monroe picture I keep seeing? How do I draw that?
The Marilyn Monroe drawing is an svg file that is nothing more than one single line or more accurately a continuous loop with no beginning or end. The line never overlaps itself of crosses over itself. So we just need to tell the gocupi which svg to draw at what size. The user specifies the marilyn.svg file at a height of 40 centimeters and the gocupi draws the image on the vertical surface with the command “svg 400 /path/to/marilyn.svg”
The gocupi was made by members of the Dallas Makerspace, and was a successfully funded Kickstarter Project. It was even a Staff Pick and featured on the home page of Kickstarter.com
Grand Prairie, TX, United States of America
Ships from United States of America.
By clicking Register, you confirm that you accept our Terms & Conditions
We recognize our top users by making them a Tindarian. Tindarians have access to secret & unreleased features.
We look for the most active & best members of the Tindie community, and invite them to join. There isn't a selection process or form to fill out. The only way to become a Tindarian is by being a nice & active member of the Tindie community!