An Arduino Uno provides the intelligence. The motors are each controlled by a ULN2003 stepper motor drivers. Two drive the drawing controls and the third flips the device forward to erase the previous drawing. The EtchABot uses three small stepper motors. Part of presentation is on how to measure and correct for this backlash. If that isn’t bad enough, the backlash is different in the vertical or horizontal directions. The major hassle with making a CNC version of this toy is the slop in the drawing mechanism. There is a large amount of backlash when you reverse the drawing direction. The topper is the version that runs as a clock! Once you build something like this, you can hardly stop writing firmware for it produced an entire Arduino library of code to allow joystick doodling, drawing web images, and a self-erasing spirograph mode. This version by certainly takes the award for precision and utility. Turning the classic toy Etch-A-Sketch into a CNC drawing tablet intrigues a large number of hackers. Then again, if you are in the “go big or go home” camp, we’d redirect to this pong game, instead.

If you were trying to get a kid interested in Arduino, you could do worse than start with two projects with video that are fun, use a handful of easy-to-source parts, and shares hardware. If you want 640×480 resolution from an Arduino, it can be done, but it takes more hardware. If we were building it, we’d be tempted to put a tilt sensor or an accelerometer in the box so you could shake it to erase the picture. Of course, if you were really building it just for the drawing toy, you’d probably put it all in a box. You can see videos of both the art toy and the pong game, below.īecause the device started as a pong game, version has two boxes, each with a pot and a button. The hardware includes two pots and with the right firmware, it can also play pong, if you don’t want to give bent your artistic side. Sure, you can only do four colors with a 120×60 resolution, but on the other hand, it requires almost no hardware other than the Arduino (you do need four resistors). Regardless, his project shows how an Arduino can drive a VGA monitor using the VGAx library. How do we know? Simple, Etch-a-Sketch is a registered trademark. We hate to break it to, but he’s built a VGA drawing toy, not an Etch-a-Sketch. If you’re not much of an artist, here’s a TV-sized Etch-a-Sketch build that can draw by itself. The enclosure is four sheets of 6mm MDF glued together, and we like the use of protoboard to distribute GND and 5 V in the name of keeping the thing slim. Inside the requisite red enclosure with white knobs are an Arduino Nano and a 16×16 RGB LED matrix.

And while we’re dreaming up improvements, it would be awesome to add an accelerometer so you could shake it clear like a standard Etch-a-Sketch. We hope one of the colors is setting it back to darkness in case you screw up. Push the left encoder down and it cycles through eight color choices, or push the right one down to go through them backwards. But this wouldn’t be a 21st century toy without newfangled features. The familiar movements are there - the left knob moves the cursor left and right, and the right knob moves it up and down. Instead of scraping aluminum powder off of plastic by driving a stylus on an x-y gantry with a pair of knobs, this bad boy uses rotary encoders to move the cursor around and put down squares of colored light. is bringing the Etch-a-Sketch into the 21st century while at the same time, bringing an even bigger air of mystery, at least for the normies.

We never did crack open our Etch-a-Sketch, but we did scrape out a window large enough to really check out the mechanism inside.

Etch a sketch inside