Create Works of Art Automatically with the Flingbot Paint Flinger

Inspiration

Works of art are made to showcase creative talent and serve as a way to transform thoughts into a physical manifestation. Techniques can range from simple brushstrokes to splattering paint across a blank canvas, which was popularized by the artist Jackson Pollock throughout the mid twentieth century. The YouTuber known as JBV Creative (Jay) wanted to solve a problem that he encountered while painting: not enjoying painting. Instead, he wanted to construct a robot that could do the difficult part for him while still leaving a masterpiece behind. The design he came up with was dubbed the "Flingbot" since it utilizes a central catapult to launch paint towards a surface.

Required hardware

To begin, Jay started out by thinking of how exactly his idea could be implemented. Because he wanted a total of 12 different color options for his bot to select from, 12 individual servo motors were purchased to act as valves. An additional four servo motors were needed to control various arm parameters, including the tension, scoop profile, and angle. All of these motors were connected to a central Lynxmotion SSC-32U 32 Servo Controller board that is able to handle the high number of motor connections. Best of all, it communicates via UART, so the Arduino Uno could easily send commands via a SoftwareSerial port.

Loading paint colors

Getting the paint from the canister and into the scoop was one of the most challenging aspects in the project. Jay opted to create a system in which 12 paint reservoirs sit slightly elevated with small rubber tubes coming out the bottom of each one. Then by using a gravity-fed mechanism, paint can fall down. A single servo on each tube can either open or close to allow paint through for a specified amount of time.

Constructing the launch mechanism

With the paint now able to be deposited into the scoop, the final step was building a launcher to send it to the canvas. The base of the arm has a servo motor with a cog that connects to a rotating pivot joint that can move the entire assembly left or right. Above that, the platform has a pulley and another servo motor that pulls an elastic band to a certain level of tension before releasing it to launch the paint. The last portion of the arm is a servo motor with a string that pulls on the silicone scoop to adjust its shape and therefore how the paint will appear once it lands.

Programming the robot

Programming the Flingbot was relatively linear. The code starts by going through each of the 10 parameters and randomly adjusts each one for a total of nearly 3 trillion total possible painting results, meaning that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for any two paintings to be the same.

You can check out JBV Creative's build log and demo video below to see the results.