This Liquid Lite Brite Puts Your Childhood Toy to Shame
If you had the pleasure of owning a Lite-Brite toy as a child, then you will love Zach Frew’s Liquid Lite Brite.
The Lite-Brite is a kid’s toy that dates all the way back to 1967 and is still on the market today. It’s a simple toy consisting of a backlit perforated faceplate that you can stick little colorful, translucent pegs into to make low resolution pictures. It seems unlikely that it will be manufactured for much longer, since today’s kids have access to iPads and all the colorful drawing apps they could ever want. But the toy is a classic and many of us have fond memories of it. Zach Frew wanted to make a special version of the toy and this Liquid Lite Brite is the result.
The Liquid Lite Brite works a lot like the toy it was inspired by, but instead of colored plastic pegs it uses droplets of dyed water. The droplets are automatically mixed and deposited by the machine, so it can form perfect pixelated pictures. It works off of digital pictures and mixes CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key) colors on demand as necessary to replicate each pixel in the pictures. The mixed colors are deposited into a grid of 24 x 16 reservoirs, so the resolution is pretty low. But that is still plenty for pixel art.
The machine that does all of the work here is a lot like a 3D printer, just with the extruder swapped for the dropper syringe. It was constructed from aluminum extrusion and linear rails, and is actuated by ball screws. Like many 3D printers, it is controlled by an Arduino Mega with a RAMPS 1.4 shield. It also runs g-code commands, which are generated by a special Python script that uses an image as the input.
The liquid is pumped from reservoirs containing the CMYK colors, plus an additional reservoir with plain “white” water. Servos are used to open and close valves so that only the desired colors are pumped at any given time. The machine is programmed to drop the required volume of each color into the small reservoirs on the image plate where they mix. The white water is used to ensure that each pixel contains the same amount of water in order to yield a more consistent image. As you can see, the results are absolutely spectacular. Frew obviously put a lot of money and time into building the Liquid Lite Brite and it really shows.