Way back in the Middle Ages, monks and other scribes used to work out of a “Scriptorium,” brittling their hand bones for months or even years on end in order to produce a single text. Nowadays we have tools like the AxiDraw Personal Writing and Drawing Machine, which can do all of that for us in a fraction of the time, with exactly zero human hand bones damaged.
Read our mechanically precise illustrations and weep, medieval monkaroos!
The AxiDraw, demonstrated in the above video and available here for $450, is a consumer product offered by The Evil Mad Scientist Shop, which is “the business side of Evil Mad Science LLC, a small family-owned company based in Sunnyvale, California.” When you think of evil mad scientists, you think of family-owned businesses in Sunnyvale, California.
In order to achieve its super precise illustrations, the AxiDraw, like other pen plotters, uses vector graphics. Vector graphics use a file that contains data made up of either straight or curved lines, as well as the points where those lines begin and end, their respective curvatures, and the colors that make up their borders and fills. This contrasts with raster graphics, which are used for images like GIFs or JPEGs, and contain an array of differently colored pixels that are arranged in a certain pattern in order to produce a printable image.
Although it’s essentially the same as other pen plotters, the AxiDraw is especially consumer friendly as it “comes fully assembled, tested, and ready to use, right out of the box.” The machine is also capable of holding a huge variety of pens, from Sharpies to white board markers, and can write on almost any flat surface. Now if the evil mad scientists can just figure out a way to slap this thing on MIT’s flying pantograph drone, we can bring “skywriting” to a whole new level.
What do you think about the AxiDraw? Are you considering marriage now just so you can use this thing to calligraph your wedding invitations? Let us know in the comments section below!
—
Images: Evil Mad Science LLCÂ via High-Tech
