a tiny blue dot

Inspiration

A little blue light flickers on the wall, it starts spinning faster and faster, suddenly you can make out a shape, a letter! One after the other letters keep flickering by, as if to send a message.

What it does

Gives the little blue dot a set of instructions to draw pictures on the wall, and then does it

How we built it

Using Pyo, we control the audio output of a computer to drive an amplifier which powers 2 galvanometers controlling the X and Y axis of the blue dot

Challenges we ran into

Finding a good API to produce signals, and then designing the signals to draw the funciton we wanted to draw in a non-linear system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We actually got letters to be drawn!

What we learned

A whole lot about resonance and mechanical error propagation, as well as signal generation and production in a linux environment

What's next for a tiny blue dot

Better faster tiny blue dot-ness, a hardware PID controller and all inclusive API designed from the ground up to be user interfaceablle. Ideally a grid where you can drag and drop dots and the tiny blue dot will trace them out.

Built With

• a-smol-blue-dot