10 Print Box

Concept

Recently, Noopkat appeared as a guest on The Coding Train. The subject of the stream was generative art running on hardware, which was something I hadn’t considered experimenting with previously. Specifically, the stream focussed on getting the 10 Print algorithm running on an LCD screen attached to an Arduino.

I was reminded of the TVOut library for Arduino, which I’d played with before, so I thought I’d combine it with the ideas in the stream and create a new generative toy.

Hardware

I wanted to make a small device, so I picked up a spare Arduino Nano, a potentiometer for adjusting the random threshold, an RCA jack for video output and a couple of resistors which form a small DAC network for generating the video signal.

I knocked up a case in Fusion 360 to hold all of the components, which wraps it up into a neat little package.

Code

The essence of the 10 Print algorithm is randomly generating forward-leaning and backward-leaning diagonal lines in a grid pattern. Adjusting the threshold that decided which way the next line points can lead to some interesting results, so the code performs an analogRead of the potentiometer and uses this as the threshold.

The TVOut library does the heavy lifting of the drawing to screen, so the code ended up being pretty simple. It’s on GitHub for remixing or recreating.