Etch A Sketch CNC machine

Nikodem’s robot was originally going to attach to the Etch A Sketch, but after the first prototype he realised that this would make it unfeasibly heavy. As the way to erase the Etch A Sketch’s screen is to pick it up and shake it, this wouldn’t do. So instead he settled on a docking station design, which he modelled in Fusion 360 – the build comprises just three 3D printed parts for the frame, plus the gears that go over the Etch A Sketch’s buttons, two stepper motors and drivers, and a Raspberry Pi Pico, all mounted on a homemade PCB milled on a CNC machine that Nikodem made out of a Dremel. 

One thing that caught our eye about this build is that the software was written with AI; specifically Google Antigravity. It took a bit of debugging, and then a bit more when ChatGPT mangled the implementation of Bresenham’s algorithm, which is a way of converting lines into discrete steps. Luckily, Nikodem had already used this algorithm successfully on another build, so he knew what to look for in order to fix it.