A Digital Take on the Classic Etch A Sketch

Despite the horrible interface and poor-quality monochrome images it displays, people everywhere love the Etch A Sketch. Something about twisting those dials and making things work without ever lifting the drawing tool makes it way more fun than a pencil and paper. The love for this toy also extends into the hardware hacking community, where we have seen everything from robots that do the hard work for us to peripherals for retro computers.

Now YouTuber Tekavou has come up with another really cool Etch A Sketch hack. He has built what he calls the Teka-Sketch, and rather than building on top of the classic toy, he reimagined what an Etch A Sketch could be. You never need to shake this one, because it uses an ePaper screen for the display. But even still, it is true to its roots — images are drawn as a single, continuous line without lifting the “pen.”

After playing with the Teka-Sketch for a while, Tekavou realized that he did not have an artistic bone in his body. He tried adding an “undo” button to see if that helped, but no such luck. After that, he coded up some games for it and called it a day.

But this failure bugged him, so he came up with a technological solution to the problem. He upgraded the device to give it the ability to draw images on its own. Since this is a purely digital device, no robots or anything of the sort was necessary. But he did have to spend a lot of time iterating on the drawing algorithm, not only to get it to work, but also to get it to look like a real Etch A Sketch drawing.

Once that was finally sorted out, Tekavou decided to add a final finishing touch — a camera. This handheld device is powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a Camera Module 3. After an image is snapped, it is transmitted to a nearby Mac Mini M4 Pro, which makes short work of running the image processing algorithm that produces an SVG. The result is then sent to the Teka-Sketch, which gets busy drawing the image.

If the camera is out of range of the Mac Mini, it simply saves the images to its internal memory. When it comes back in wireless range later, the images can be processed and transferred to the Teka-Sketch.

The images produced by the device look quite good. I dare say they are even better than a real Etch A Sketch. That may not be entirely surprising, however, because the ePaper screen can be drawn to with much greater precision than hands and a dial can achieve.

This is not the final update for the Teka-Sketch, so be sure to stay tuned to see what Tekavou still has up his sleeve.