By Andrew Liszewski
The Etch A Sketch is probably one of the most limited canvases an artist can work with. Not only does it have a dull, gray monochrome display and a set of simple knobs in lieu of a brush or pencil, but the slightest bump can undo an afternoon’s hard work on your ‘house with smoke coming out of the chimney under the smiling sun’ masterpiece. On the other hand, that’s really the Etch A Sketch’s charm isn’t it? Drawing just for the sake of drawing? Well Rakesh Reddy seems to disagree. He feels the Etch A Sketch’s temporary nature can be frustrating, so using a stepper motor and a collection of resistors, capacitors, switches and micro controllers on a PCB board, he created the Remember-It-All Electronic Etch A Sketch which can actually record and reproduce any drawing created with the device.
His build instructions are actually available for download from DesignNews.com if you want to build your own, but I’m hesitant to link directly to them since they’re provided as Word doc files. Surely if you’re able to build an Etch A Sketch with a memory, you can convert a Word file to a PDF no?
[ Gadget Freak Case 129: Remember-It-All Electronic Etch A Sketch ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]
My first instinct was to scream blasphemy for messin' with the good old Etch-a-Sketch but, you know, this could be a really cool upgrade. If your kids could make some cool drawings and then print them off it would make really cool wall art for their rooms.
That's pretty cool but also fairly sad at the sametime. I wonder if anyone has built a software version of etch-a-sketch?
That's pretty cool but also fairly sad at the sametime. I wonder if anyone has built a software version of etch-a-sketch?
That's pretty cool but also fairly sad at the sametime. I wonder if anyone has built a software version of etch-a-sketch?