The Best Artist In the Room

Test Run with Anime Characters
Test Run with Pickles

We were inspired by wanting to do something that involved everyone on our team. We have a mechanical engineer on our team, which made this a bit of a challenge when everyone else was a computer scientist.

The program will search a given website for images, create a 4 panel comic using those images and randomly chosen quotes, and then convert that comic into an SVG file and then GCode file. We then use that GCode file to tell a 3d printer with a pen strapped to it how to draw that comic.

We used Python to create all of our code, as well as some bash scripts, we found a few libraries online that we could use to help with the file conversion but unfortunately they were in Python 2. We had to update those which was a bit of a challenge, and getting the settings just right so that we could print some legible was incredibly difficult. Eventually though, we were able to actually get comics on paper. We were all amazed we got to that point, and with only an hour left in the Hackathon.

We all learned a lot about how 3d printers worked, and our mechanical engineer learned a lot about programming. Overall we all got to experience something new, which was great. Next up for us is trying to get the drawings to be a bit more clean, if we had more time we could have experimented with different approaches to generating GCode, but unfortunately we didn't quite get to that point.