Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

New video: wall painting robot (Patreon)

Published:
2021-10-30 23:04:23
Imported:
2026-06

Content

The new shop feels so sterile with its giant blank off-white walls. It bothered me so much that I cleared my project queue so that I could deal with it. 

The end result is a spray painting robot with a pretty fun design. It's a weird mix of graffiti and inkjet printers that allows me to paint / print any photo that I want on the wall. I started with painting possibly the dumbest thing that I could imagine, but now that I have a robot it should be relatively straightforward to paint whatever I want. 

I'm really interested in the idea of somehow connecting this robot to the internet. Perhaps a real life version of r/place. If you have any ideas on how to do something like this in a fun and interesting SFW way please share :).

As always there are a lot of details that didn't make the cut so I'll be doing a patreon only directors commentary in the coming weeks. I'll post a link to it when we get a little closer. 

Thanks so much for all your support. I really appreciate it.

- Shane

Files

A giant photo painting robot named Janksy

Check out https://KiwiCo.com/StuffMadeHere to get 50% off your first month of ANY crate! Help support these videos on patreon: http://patreon.com/stuffmadehere Subscribe to Stuff Made Here: https://tinyurl.com/sub2smh ------------------------------ I moved into a new shop with some massive blank walls. I thought I would break in the new space by building a robot to paint a huge mural for me. Hope you like it! Other great things (your purchase helps support this channel): * I use a glowforge pro for rapid prototyping and it's great. You can $500 off a Glowforge pro here: http://glowforge.com/stuffmadehere

Comments

Damien Le Thiec

You should definitely sell paintings made by the robot !!

EvySpaghetti

You’ve awoken so much elementary school art class knowledge about colors I’d forgotten about.

Chloë Jane

I love it!! Such a cool project. The results have a really cool look too!

rivques

It would be really cool to try to "crowdsource" an image with the robot, kind of like the song at https://crowdsound.net/. Would probably take some limiting to make it look like an actual image instead of a blur of pixels. Or set a goal of an image and see if the internet can actually make it.

Kyle G

I'm a 52 y/o electronics tech. Not much makes me giddy. When that SMH alert went off I was well and truly giddy. Did not disappoint.

DEX

I love the r/place idea but it also sounds really really hard

ansik

That painting honestly turned out great!

ZapWizard

The tracking method is a great idea, as well as the counter-balance.

Jeff C

Thanks for asking for more support. I just increased my membership level.

Daniel Hadar

I would definitely buy a robot made art!! 100%

Luca

I think doing something like a vector art would even look better. Like filling the the backgrounds and then drawing black over the edges to "hide" inconsistent borders. The signature you've made seems to imply that continuous drawing is feasible. I guess you could make it look great even if using only a handful of colors. I guess that would be something like a "graffiti bot".

Adnan Haque

This was really cool! As for ideas to connect this to the internet, one of the recent projects on my team takes a phrase/multiple key words and uses a model to generate an image capturing those words. We've been using this as a way to demonstrate the hidden biases in some image and NLP models. When I looked at this, it occurred to me you can use the same technology to randomly sample words on a subreddit you create or your discord and automatically generate an image on a recurring basis. Full disclosure, you'll need an appreciation for abstract art. If you really want to get fancy, you could even generate an image in the style of an artist that's crowdsourced. I'd be happy to contribute. The stuff you've been building is great and personally inspiring.

Max Lielje

Another great project that was a pleasure to watch. The little part of the face that you showed again at the end i think actually looks quite good from a distance. Thank you!

Mark M

Janksy has to be one of my favorite projects you’ve done - just really excellent work. Does it have a white out mode to repaint the wall white and leave you with a blank canvas?

Andrew Bent

Really loved this! Are you going to do a Q&A video on the project? Really interesting in hearing things like how much human intervention was actually needed for things like paint changes, etc.

J

The editing/visuals of the video was really great (as usual). I was wondering how the paint got into the sprayer and if you needed to refill it very often

stuffmadehere

I think that could work and is something I want to try. I played it safe since was worried about consistency / control of the sprayer for making lines and such but I want to make more art with more techniques!

stuffmadehere

Yep! Likely in a week or two. I'll post a link for it once I get it nailed down.

stuffmadehere

Thanks! There was a paint hopper on the gun. The robot would track how much time it had run the sprayer for and after a certain amount of painting time it would ask me if I wanted to refill it (literally, playing a loud sound since I was usually elsewhere). If I wanted to fill it, it would bring the robot to a refill point and I would fill the hopper from a big syringe of paint. Each color needed to be refilled two-ish times for the whole wall

stuffmadehere

It basically does - I could tell it to paint a solid color and just fill it with white paint. I'm itching to try to paint more complicated things, but I also don't want to eliminate my art....

stuffmadehere

that's interesting. I wonder if theres a way to make make it real time semi-adversarial. Like participants can push the image one way or the other with more keywords to try to turn it into some target image (kind of like twitch plays pokemon meets machine learning or something). Not totally sure how that would fit in with real time painting, but something like that I think could be really fun

Adnan Haque

Making it semi-adversarial where people can contribute in real time is an interesting idea, and I don't think it would be that hard to do (famous last words). You can "freeze" parts of the image as those parts are painted, leaving people with the ability to influence the rest. It might result in a painting that really stretches the imagination. I don't know how you can keep the real-time aspect and prevent it from becoming nsfw.

michael schem

What microcontrollers are you using?

stuffmadehere

Since the work is simple I'm using an arduino uno clone here. For most projects I use teensy boards which have significantly higher performance

michael schem

Nice, are there any motion control or pid libraries you used?

Lucas Oehms

Amazing Video, maybe you could find a big wall and auction off square sections of said wall for people to upload their image to be pri ted there.

William

Yeah like this image someone made online where people could buy a certain amount of pixels. Cant remember if it has a name..

Bill Woodcock

Somewhere, I don't remember whether it was here or Reddit Twitter or whatever, I was going to send you a note making sure you knew about stochastic screening, which I think would have gotten you closer to what you were aiming for. If you're still playing with all of this, you might want to take a look at it, since it's a (relatively) simple software change, compared to all the hard work that you've already done.

Hamish Bertenshaw

I'd love to adopt a piece of this wall, part of the lazer eyes :) i know you hate asking for this stuff so this is me offering - $50USD for a small section

Mitchell Grenier

So I thought this was really cool and tried replicating the halftoning process and got a completely different magenta layer than you show at 11:36. The ground in my magenta layer is almost completely white where it's quite visible in yours. Was this a bug you found in your software later? An artistic decision because it looks pretty weird the way the magenta layer comes out? A bug in my code? :p Amazing video as always!

Adam Ingram

Hey, I’m not sure if you’ll read this but I just had this idea and became a patron just in hopes of you seeing this. Can you make gloves that let you play the piano? I’m picturing almost a haptic feedback glove that moves your fingers to the correct keys at the correct time. You’re the only creator I know who I think could pull this off.