ELECTRONIC ART Using an accelerometer
Painting with XLoBorg
Fred Sonnenwald & Hamish Cunningham
Guest Writers
SKILL LEVEL : INTERMEDIATE Maker Culture meets Art
for old lego Robots.
There is a new conjunction emerging around open hardware, maker culture, and art. Remember how pop culture changed with the advent of punk in the late seventies? We seem to be witnessing a similar explosion of 'garageband' creativity in the tennies, and the Raspberry Pi is proudly leading the charge for general purpose open source devices in this context. (The Raspberry Pi Foundation even has an artist in residence — Rachel Rayns.)
This article describes the PiBrush, a simple on-screen painting system that uses the XLoBorg motion and direction sensor add-on board from PiBorg. The XLoBorg adds an accelerometer and a magnetometer (compass) to your Pi and makes all sorts of motion-based interaction possible — like a Kinect, but free and open. The header graphic for this article was created with the PiBrush.
Open-source hardware allows people to make their own robots, cameras or even electrocardiagraph machines by downloading schematics and incorporating any changes they need — and, typically, free open-source software is available to run these projects. 3D printers, laser cutters and CNC routers have helped this adoption of the openeverything ethos. There are stacks of DIY projects based on the Raspberry Pi, and the flood shows no sign of slowing. The Raspberry Pi is the first general purpose device (in contrast to the magnificent, but more specialised Arduino), which is very easy to cobble together with add-on electronics. The thriving community that has grown up around the Raspberry Pi (including this magazine) is making a huge impact, from changes in the UK school curriculum to the Onion Pi anti-surveillance device and BrickPi's new brains
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The PiBrush is an interactive art and technology exhibit (a rather grand name for something so small) that simulates flicking paint off the end of a paintbrush onto canvas — as Jackson Pollock famously did in the 1 940s and 50s. The setup includes two Raspberry Pis (one Model B and one Model A), one XLoBorg, a battery pack, a display and two Wi-Fi dongles. The Model A is held by the user and waved around. It collects acceleration data with the XLoBorg. These data are then transmitted via Wi-Fi to the Model B, which processes the data collected into paint droplets and displays them on the screen. Functionally it looks like this: