This Raspberry Pi bot for Etch A Sketch will bring out the inner artist in you

Mastering Etch A Sketch — is not an easy task. It’s not enough to have a grasp of basic art composition skills, you have to make your masterpiece in one go, using one very long line. Instead of racking his brains to create the pictures by hand, creator and developer Micah Tilton decided to program a Raspberry Pi to draw the Etch A Sketch for him.

The way the project works is simple and straightforward in concept, but not so simple in execution. The Raspberry Pi 4 controls a real Etch A Sketch, driving a pair of stepper motors. These are attached to the Etch A Sketch’s handles using 3D printed adapters. It’s a clever idea to use the best 3D printers to make tools to reuse existing components. Using these 3D printed stepper motor adapters, the Raspberry Pi can draw images directly onto the circuit board like some very inefficient but super cool printer.

The Raspberry Pi can draw images directly onto the circuit board like some very inefficient but super cool printer.

To meet this challenge, Tilton had to develop a program that could take an existing image and transfer it to a file that Pi could use to duplicate his design with a single line on Etch A Sketch. In order for the images to fit together, Tilton determined that with a workspace size of 153 mm x 107 mm and a line width of .5 mm, Etch A Sketch’s resolution was approximately 300 x 214. This also required Tilton to measure and convert the resolution to one that the stepper motors could work with.

At the same time, Tilton was able to measure and convert the resolution to one that the stepper motors could work with.

Pi scales the image to fit Etch A Sketch’s screen resolution. It is then converted to black and white pixels and evaluated to determine how best to recreate it with a single line.

Tilton chose a Raspberry Pi 4 as the «brain» for the Etch A Sketch bot, but you can use a smaller model like a Pi 3 or even a Zero 2 instead. You don’t need a lot of processing power for this project, but since the Raspberry Pi 4 is a cheaper alternative to the new flagship Raspberry Pi 5, you can buy a better Pi for the job. If you’d like a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, check out the video Tilton shared on YouTube.

Here’s a video of the Raspberry Pi project.