This is a robot of sorts to drive an Etch-a-sketch. With it you can plot arbitrary single-line paths. A Turtle Graphics implimentation is provided for children to learn programming and robotics. A voronoi stippling tool is provides which, along with a Traveling Salesman solver, can convert photographs to single-lines suitable for plotting.
There are two main components: A front-end, currently provided by Berkeley's Snap programming environment for kids. Various project files are included within frontend/ which customize the extreemely flexible Snap environment to serve as a simulator and language sharpened for working with SketchBot.
In order to communicate with the hardware from Snap, backend.exe must be running. This listens for commands over HTTP. It is a .NET console app (written in F#). It depends on the MonoBrick communications library which is included in external/.
On Linux or OS X, you will need to install Mono and F# and may then build with xbuild or Xamarin. On Windows, regular .NET will do and you may build from Visual Studio or Xamarin.
sudo apt-get install mono-complete
sudo apt-get install fsharp
xbuild backend.sln
You will need to run backend.exe as an admin (allowed to listen on HTTP). You will be first asked to calibrate the system to learn the extent of the screen on your particular Etch A Sketch. This is very important: the motors may easily break things if the knobs are driven off the screen.