Design studio Diatom have created a small device with immense potential. It's the tiny CNC based robot called Piccolo, an automated small bot that can draw by its own.
Piccolo is a low-cost kitset device that uses servos to create a mechanism for tinkering with or developing for basic 2D or 3D CNC output. Applications range from simple drawings, generative designs and data visualations, to small scale laser cutting or 3d printing, depending on the tool head used. Piccolo’s small size, low power and low cost makes it easy to use in almost any environment and in multiples.
The Piccolo project includes Arduino and Processing libraries, to use Piccolo in a variety of ways such as moving autonomously or responding to sensors and data, whilst providing an accessible educational tool and a new output for Processing sketches.
Although Piccolo is still being developed the possibilities are huge besides fun. The open source feature they're trying to incorporate will be great for translating the processing experiments to a "hand" drawn surface, or should it be robot-drawn?
Piccolo the tiny CNC-bot from diatom studio on Vimeo.