Introducing the CNC photo booth! A completely frivolous and hilarious use of large industrial machinery!

I rigged this up because I had a party at the shop last night and wanted people to be able to interact with the machining center in a fun but non dangerous way!

Basically you take your photo on the webcam on my laptop, and then there's a program I wrote that converts the image to grayscale and produces a depth map from it. That is then converted to g-code and sent to the machine where it is 'printed' using a marker held in the spindle!

I only finished debugging the program *after* people started arriving so I was very pleased that it actually worked!

Everyone got to use the photo booth and have a picture done of them. It was a big hit!

On the serious side: writing the programs to make the toolpath and to communicate them to the machine have positioned me really well to use the machine for general purpose automaton in the future, a very exciting prospect!

#instamachinist #machining #machinist #machineshop #cnc #maker #bigassrobots


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