Car tells robot artist what to paint

Mark Frauenfelder 5:34 pm Tue Sep 3, 2013

[Video Link] A robot that paints water colors is super. A car that generates dozens of data streams is awesome. When you connect the two, as Joe Grand, Ben Krasnow, "Super-Awesome" Sylvia, and TechNinja did at our Boing Boing Ingenuity: Data Driven hack day held on August 17, 2013, the result is super awesome. It's no surprise that this 3-man, 1-girl team took home our Grand Prize "Best Use of Ford OpenXC" award. The prize: a brand new Replicator 2 desktop 3D printer, courtesy of our friends at MakerBot.

The hack, called the OpenXC Van Go, used Ford's OpenXC platform to collect steering wheel, accelerator, and brake data, which controlled the paintbrush on "Super-Awesome" Sylvia's WaterColorBot. The paint color was selected using the transmission gear position. As the team said, "colorful maps will come to life based on a driver's real world automobile interactions."

In the video below, Xeni interviews "Super Awesome" Sylvia and a young maker named Lux about the WaterColorBot.

In the coming days, we'll post videos of the other Data Driven award winners.

(Here's an overview of everything that happened at our first-ever hack day, which was held on the first day of Boing Boing: Ingenuity, a two-day extravaganza of art, science and creativity.)

Boing Boing: Ingenuity in partnership with Ford C-Max.

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