Fun analog PlotBot hack

Our friends at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories created a fun e-paper device with a 1970s analog chart recorder and a Fisher-Price Doodle Pro.

What do you get when you mix a 1970's style analog chart recorder, an 8-bit microcontroller, and a Fisher-Price Doodle Pro? A truly 21st century toy: An analog PlotBot with e-paper display technology!

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So is it really e-paper? It turns out that it is. Strictly speaking, this is a magnetic display, not an electronic display. However, magnetic fields can be generated with electronics, so that point is negotiable. Much more importantly, it has all the hallmarks of electronic paper: it is a high-contrast, daylight-readable display that reflects ambient light much like regular paper. It is flexible, erasable, and it requires no electricity to maintain an image on the screen. And as it turns out, variations on this technology are actively being explored for use as electronic paper, as evidenced by a growing number of patents on the subject.

This particular one happens to be a big and flexible e-paper display-- not bad for fifteen bucks! Link

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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gelstudios

Great Work! I’ve been looking for big sheets of this stuff. Anyone know where to find this, or something similar? I don’t really want to tear a bunch of “doodle-pro’s” apart and fisher-price was not very helpful :-).
Lars Haeh

Pretty cool, but you can do this without the custom circuitry pretty easily: Just use a plotter and replace one of the pens with a magnet. The advantage here is that used plotters are cheap (I sold my old one for $50 many years ago) and the drawing software is already out there. Still, this is a nice hack of an old technology.

As an aside, those things took forever to print text, it would be nice to see one printing in cursive writing so it wouldn’t keep having to reposition the pen. It would be awesome if he could pull that off.
stratosfyr

I saw a Magna Doodle the other day and thought, wow, this is like macroscopic e-paper. So good to know I’m not the only one…