Open Drawing Machine is a low-cost open source drawing machine for controlling drawing instruments with motors and code, and it is oriented for beginners in media arts.
This project is an exploration of programmatic and procedural drawing. It is designed to use different drawing instruments, such as pens, brushes, and to use code to choreograph their movement over the drawing surface.
This project is built on top of other open technologies such as the Arduino microcontroller and the G-code programming language.
The open hardware and software to build your own Open Drawing Machine are currently available at its website github.com/montoyamoraga/open-drawing-machine.
The website also includes all the resources for building your own Open Drawing Machine, including the models for the required 3D printed parts, the bill of materials with a total cost of $150 USD, and the instructions for setting up your machine.
The Open Drawing Machine can be controlled via a serial port using the programming language G-code, or with the openFrameworks library we wrote, available at github.com/montoyamoraga/ofxOpenDrawingMachine.
The next steps for this library are to be ported to other open source programming languages such as Processing and p5.js, and to include the ability to receive drawing instructions over computer networks.