Draw Pictures for Everyone to See and Share with the "Vektorkollektor" Device

What is the Vektorkollektor?

Producing art in public is a great way to involve the surrounding community and get everyone to join in a creative endeavor. Niklas Roy and Kati Hyyppä got the inspiration to build a device that combined both the physical and virtual worlds by allowing people to draw art with a marker and then also have it as a file for easy reproduction or scaling. This machine is called the Vektorkollektor, and as the name implies, it collects vector drawings from artists.

Controlling the writing utensil

The first challenge in building such a machine was figuring out how to translate between the idea in someone's head and getting it onto a sheet of paper while also recording it. Roy and Hyyppä decided to use a pen-plotting mechanism due to the simplicity in controlling it and building the rig. The starting point was a donated HP7475A pen plotter from the 1980s, but due to a power supply failure, all of its electronics were fried and had to be replaced. The gantry moves by having a single DC motor on each axis rotate a belt while a rotary encoder tracks the position of the head.

There is a main Arduino Nano board that acts as a central hub for everything else. Movement inputs are provided by an arcade joystick which get picked up by the Nano and converted into motor movements. While this is happening, the Nano is also recording each movement and displays it on a small TFT screen as well as logging it to an SD card for exportation elsewhere. And finally, the Vektorkollektor has an Arduino Uno with an Adafruit Music Maker shield which plays music whilst the artists draw their masterpieces for additional ambiance.

How are drawings recorded?

At the most basic level, every single movement the gantry takes is recorded to a file on the SD card in the form of an X coordinate, a Y coordinate, and a Z coordinate, the last of which simply alternates between zero and one depending on if the pen is touching the paper or not. With this data, Mario Voigt was able to program a custom Inkscape plugin that converts the data from the file into a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. From here, the picture can be altered, colored, or scaled depending on what the user wants.

Going even further

Roy and Hyyppä didn't just want to draw on paper, so he took those simple art pieces and scaled them up to mural-sized works of art. The data was taken to his "big spray can plotter", which has not been documented yet, and guided the much larger gantry to paint the images on a building's wall.

You can view the video below to see the Vektorkollektor in action, as well as some of the works of art created with it.