Make: Online : Gertrude: An Led Drawing Machine by Chris McDonald

Gertrude: An Led Drawing Machine by Chris McDonald

Chris McDonald made this extra-great, 2-axis drawing machine for doing time-lapse photography.

Here's the info from his website vanita phone company:

Gertrude uses two stepper motors to move an LED in a very high resolution x/y plane. The movement of the LED is photographed using exposures usually between 30 and 90 seconds. Gertrude can either be programmed to "print" a design automatically ("Christopher & Daniil", the Hell Yup!: Scanlines shots) or controlled live via a joystick (Open&Close portrait series). ...more info

II: Christopher & Daniil not talking (pt. 2 in a series of 2)

Hell Yup!: Scanlines 3 (Self-Portrait)

Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: TimW on March 14, 2008 at 6:39 AM

So glad they made their website easy to navigate and with a wealth of information.

I like it when MAKE posts projects with at least a little technical detail on how it was made or a hint or two.

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Posted by: not a slave to fashion on March 14, 2008 at 8:55 AM

Nice elbow patches dude, that's a better illustrated make than the LED thing.

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Posted by: Peleken on March 14, 2008 at 9:39 AM

Maybe I've got poor reading comprehension or something but, what the heck is this article about? I'll try reading it again .... nope. Maybe I'll click the link here for this phone company thingy .... nope. I'm starting to worry guys am I retarded?

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Posted by: Scottward on March 14, 2008 at 9:59 AM

AAAArrrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!

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Posted by: Rocketguy on March 14, 2008 at 10:19 AM

This seems like self-promoting spam to me.

The site is primarily about his bands, and there are no references to the machine that I could find, other than one of the above picture captions. If yer gonna post to the make blog, it ought to be.. I dunno... about making things? Real data?

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Posted by: Baxter on March 14, 2008 at 10:23 AM

Fake machine just to drive viewers to the
noise filled web site.

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Posted by: asd>F<; on March 14, 2008 at 10:53 AM

Wow, y'all are haters! Can't you just enjoy the pictures? Jesus.

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Posted by: asd eff eff eff eff (semicolon) on March 14, 2008 at 10:56 AM

Oh, and the machine's not "fake." Come on, why not troll slashdot instead? :)

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Posted by: hi it's me on March 14, 2008 at 11:30 AM

definitely real enough, although "fake machine" is a beautiful concept. for proof of reality, come see it in action at this year's Bent Festival in New York (April 24th to the 26th). i'll be doing a photo booth there with Gertrude.

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Posted by: Andrew on March 17, 2008 at 1:33 AM

That web site is the most innovative, original, and useless example of web design I've ever seen.

Sometimes being beautiful is more important than being useful, though, so I'll give it a pass.

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