Digital Spin Art
a Photoshop script that starts a servo and rotates your canvas as you draw.
Using Arduino and Node.js.
concept
When I was little I had a spin art machine. You put your paper on a rotating base, and as it rotated (very fast), you would drizzle or drop paint.
This guy created the effect in real life, with a giant canvas and a lot of paint and precision:
what happened?
I have attempted to recreate this effect digitally, by mapping the speed of a servo motor to the rotation of a Photoshop canvas. The final product exists as a Photoshop plug-in, using Photoshop’s Node.js-based javascript translator Generator.
For more info on Generator and using node with Arduino, see this post.
to use:
Set up Generator using this tutorial.
Download my code.
Add the ‘nodebot’ folder to the plugins folder.
Navigate to the generator-core and activate plug-ins with this command:
node app.js -v -f ../plugins
Go to Photoshop and check File>Generate . Do you see ‘rotate canvas’ in a strange font? Click!
The canvas should rotate. Also, if you have a servo hooked up to an arduino on pin 10, it will start!