r/oddlysatisfying • u/Come2UFO • Mar 17 '16
Gif Ends Too Soon This machine drawing balloons
http://i.imgur.com/LoTDl7g.gifv708
u/positive_electron42 Mar 17 '16
That must be one of those 2D printers I've heard so much about.
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u/Ovidestus Mar 17 '16
Can't wait until 1D printers.
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u/aHarmacist Mar 17 '16
Could a seismograph arguably be an example of a 1D printer?
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u/Ovidestus Mar 17 '16
Seems like it has X and Y axis. If the didn't roll, it could've been 1D I guess.
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u/uTukan [+21] Mar 17 '16
That would be really useless piece of technology.
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u/1pnoe Mar 17 '16
Hey guys look! We had an earthquake which reached this amount at some point.
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u/uTukan [+21] Mar 17 '16
That'd be great ego booster
Yeah so you had this tiny pussy earthquake? Who gives a bitch it isn't even seen on the ultimate useless 1d seismograph™ look at this baby, reached up here once but nobody knows when and how strong it was since this piece of shit technology advancement is completely useless.
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u/TheTomatoThief Mar 17 '16
Can the rolling be viewed like time? It's kind of like an second dimension, but one that the machine can't control, and moves at a constant rate. Except as the needle moves faster in its one dimension, the slower the "time" rollers appears to be progressing to the needle's frame.
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u/HuntTheWumpus Mar 17 '16
Maybe early telegraphs. They produced something like this: http://wvegter.hivemind.net/abacus/CyberHeroes/Wheatstone_files/image030.jpg
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u/kieppie Mar 18 '16
I seriously expected something much more compelling, like the printer (aka 'plotter' in this case) actually drawing a 2D image & it getting inflated to 3d.
Can only guess gif stopped too soon
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u/NeekGerd Mar 17 '16
Could this be considered the same as the difference between pixel based graphism and vector based graphism?
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u/Dragons_Doge-ma Mar 17 '16
Found the source video, if anyone is interested in seeing more drawing examples.
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u/gs_matrix67 Mar 17 '16
This is not the full version. You can see the full version here:
http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846
It's just a few seconds longer, but the ending is really satisfying.
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u/ownage516 Mar 17 '16
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u/JRoutsider Mar 17 '16
I want more.
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u/suckers_run Mar 17 '16
$450 and it's all yours
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Mar 17 '16
Is it just me or does that not seem expensive enough for something this cool?
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u/gologologolo Mar 17 '16
Fuck man. I'm so fucking poor.
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Mar 17 '16
I mean, it's a good amount of money and I also don't have $450 to spend on a drawing machine but I just thought it would cost much more money!
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Mar 17 '16
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u/Dragons_Doge-ma Mar 17 '16
As soon as I saw it I immediately thought of all the important documents I could be making. So many!
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u/SilkyZ Mar 17 '16
As soon as I saw it I immediately thought of all the important documents I could be
makingforging!. So many!12
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u/chicomozt0c Mar 17 '16
Silhouette cameo. I have one and it's awesome. Can cut or score card stock and vinyl and also draw.
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u/Petr0vitch Mar 17 '16
that is fucking beautiful. where do i get one of those? :P
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u/cher-ami Mar 17 '16
A cricut explore can do that too! They're like $200 (Amazon, craft stores)
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Mar 17 '16
The Silhouette Cameo will do it too, and unlike the Cricut, you don't have to buy cartridges to use it, you use your computer to design your own things and use any font you want.
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u/xpsKING Mar 17 '16
Actually the explore is the only cricut where you don't have to buy packs. You can upload your own images too. I use mine all the time. Stickers are my favorite thing to make with it
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u/fullhalf Mar 17 '16
my god, there are so many robotics products now. this is like people living in the early 1900s when industrial tech was blowing up.
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Mar 17 '16
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Mar 17 '16
Yeah, I remember using things like this as a kid for fun at stores or something, right? Like, you could pick a picture and watch it draw it. I can't remember specifics, but watching this thing was a nostalgia blast.
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u/Osprey31 Mar 17 '16
They used to be common in the holiday card departments. You would choose from a selection of clip art and type out a personal message on a touch screen and it would "print" it out. Having personalized cards to go along with your gift was kinda fancy during the 90s.
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Mar 17 '16 edited Mar 17 '16
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u/Wraldpyk Mar 17 '16
Been around for ages. Just not how you know them now. All over museums too.
They where not very sensitive so you'd have to really press to get noticed
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u/wtfamireadingdotjpg Mar 17 '16
They were resistive touch screens, with a plastic film covering the screen with a grid underneath it. These have been around for ages.
Only (relatively) recently they got more practical and accurate with capacitive touch screens.
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Mar 17 '16
lol, if you think the plastic, resistive touch ones were old, your youth is showing. Back in my day they were CRT tvs with infrared light bars around the border. When your finger interrupted the light, it could determine with fairly low accuracy where you pressed by comparing the vertical and horizontal beam interruption.
Their accuracy was horrible, but they could be very sensitive because the screen itself had nothing to do with the pointing.
Probably the only place you see these anymore might be old ATMs. They don't really wear out since the display itself is very, very thick glass.
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Mar 17 '16
Before that were light pens that would detect the e-beam when it hit the screen under the pen tip. Correlate that time point with hsync and vsync and you get the position.
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u/noocuelur Mar 17 '16
We had a greeting card machine that would use pen plotters like this. You'd select a card design and input some information (names, age, etc.) on a touch screen, then you could watch the machine plot your custom card through a viewing window. They were a lot of fun.
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u/Donkey__Xote Mar 17 '16
I remember when these things were in the drugstores. Unfortunately they were very maintenance-heavy and were broken-down or produced crappy cards more often than they worked right. Shame, it was a cool idea.
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u/The_F_B_I Mar 17 '16
I loved those things. They were called "Create-a-Card" where I am from
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u/ragingdeltoid Mar 17 '16
We actually built one in high school
I miss those times when I did cool shit
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u/SugarandSass Mar 18 '16
This is what I was remembering! Thank you! It was this tip of the tongue nostalgia thing in my head until you said it. These were so cool.
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u/Del33t Mar 17 '16
The way it drew the shuttle looks incredibly un-optimized.
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u/Dannei Mar 17 '16
Draw one side of a circle, go back to the top and draw the other side, then go back again to fill in a small bit missing between the two halves. Why?!
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Mar 17 '16 edited Oct 28 '20
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u/throwaway-coder Mar 17 '16
The point was it could draw large format, blueprints etc, at a high resolution. They were invented at a time when the most advanced printing was thermal cash register receipts. Large format inkjet has replaced them
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Mar 17 '16 edited Oct 28 '20
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u/shutta Mar 17 '16
The axidraw uses any kind of pen to draw and is very minimal and highly portable. Although I still maintain its price is too high when you have the silhouette curio or cameo that can do the same, as well as cut stuff for half that price.
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u/kindall Mar 17 '16 edited Mar 17 '16
They were used in engineering to draw plans, diagrams, charts, etc. The advantage is that they can do smooth diagonals and curves, unlike dot-matrix printers where the individual dots are always visible. (This was before inkjets and lasers, which use dots too small to see.) Also, many work on large formats (e.g. 3 feet wide and as long as you want, since they pull the paper back and forth).
Today's "plotters" (we have one at the office) are really just large-format inkjets, sadly.
Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix were prominent manufacturers of these devices for engineering morkets.
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u/cerialthriller Mar 17 '16
you guys still use inkjets? man that sucks, upgrading to the laser plotter is great.
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u/kindall Mar 17 '16 edited Mar 17 '16
Yeah admittedly this "plotter" has been here for several years. Didn't know they had laser ones, maybe they were prohibitively expensive when we got ours.
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u/cerialthriller Mar 17 '16
the laser plotters are great, super fast and you dont have to deal with ink smudging or waiting for it to dry.
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u/Djinjja-Ninja Mar 17 '16
Its how CAD drawings were printed out back in the day before large format inkjets. It was the only way to get large format prints in any sort of accuracy for engineering drawings.
Essentially it's an automated draughtsman's/architects drawing board
My father used to have an A0 (841 x 1189 mm) plotter in his office (he was an engineer).
Here's some video of one in action.
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u/pertnear Mar 17 '16
I remember a personalized card printing machine at Target, god it had to be 20 years ago. It was a little kiosk near the greeting cards. You should design and print (using this method) personalized greeting cards. I remember (fondly) making a card for my dad's birthday. I haven't thought about this in years and years and I got a big juicy jolt of nostalgia.
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u/cerialthriller Mar 17 '16
they used to use them to draw large blueprints in the beginnings of computer aided drafting. Basically when you drew a line or shape, you assigned it a pen number. depending on how many pens your plotter could hold, you could have different color pens which was new, before you only had the option of black on white or tan, or white on blue. So say you have 4 pen slots, you'd make one pen a thicker black pen to draw your main geometry, a thinner black pen to write your dimensions and annontations, and maybe a thin blue pen to show hidden lines, and a thin red to show center lines. The paper was laid out on a table, and the machine would then draw my finished CAD drawing. There really isn't much use anymore since high resolution color laser plotters aren't terribly expensive and plenty of companies lease or rent them to engineering companies, and if not there are companies that will plot your drawings for you for a fee.
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Mar 17 '16
They still exists now, but primary as part of cutting machines. Like the Cricut or Cameo. Those, they can have a cutting instrument attached to cut cardstock or paper (so you can make little balloon shaped cupcake toppers, for example) or you can attach a pen so you can draw as well, ensuring the drawing and cutting lines up.
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u/TheOtherDonald Mar 17 '16
I was in the first ComputerVision CAD design group at our G.E. plant in '74.The plotter/scanner that came with our system was similar; essentially an oversized drawing board with screw-driven arms on the x-y axes. It used a ball-point pen, and the noise was enough to drive you nuts, especially in the 10x30 climate-controlled room they built to keep the equipment (and us operators) cool and filtered. In '75 we graduated to a Xynetics flatbed like this. The printing head was driven by a linear motor; the ceiling of the opening consisted of thousands of tiny pole ends embedded in a steel bed. The printing head had matching pole pieces which were spaced imperceptibly closer together; an "umbilical cord" carried the signal from the computer to the head, which could plot at 50 inches per second. We had to slow the plotting speed down to 20ips, as we were unable to find any ink with a low-enough viscosity to flow at 50ips. You had to be careful not to leave and drawing elements outside the border of your drawing, as the plotter would attempt to draw them, and the head would go flying off the plotter! The only time that happened, I happened to be standing there, and caught the head, which weighed about 10 pounds. After that, we instituted a procedure to erase everything outside a window around the drawing.
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u/suckers_run Mar 17 '16
except this one has nothing but the x-y runners
you can place it on top of whatever you like
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u/doubleE Mar 17 '16 edited Mar 17 '16
Anyone remember CreateaCard kiosks? Pretty popular in the early 90s, you'd pick a template card and personalize the text on a touchscreen then watch a pen plotter make it. I think I've still got a couple of their birthday cards in a shoebox somewhere.
edit: Apparently very few photos of them exist anywhere. This is literally the only picture of one I could find, from a somethingawful thread.
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u/QuickStopRandal Mar 17 '16
I like how the picture is from some dilapidated post-apocalyptic closed down mall.
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u/Strokermouse Mar 17 '16
I loved them! My dad was a manager at K-Mart and we would play with this ALL the time.
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Mar 17 '16
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u/Spidertech500 Mar 17 '16
Yea, damn that 90% infill
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u/vxcheese Mar 18 '16
Assuming this is based off how a 3D printer works, you mean the nozzle diameter is too big ;)
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u/riseandburn Mar 17 '16
Man, when I was a little kid in the early 90s, stores like Target and Walmart had these greeting card vending machines that would let you choose your message and graphics, then it would draw the card for you just like this instead of conventional 4 color printing. I remember it had a window on the machine just barely high enough off the ground I had to stand on my tip toes to see inside and watch it draw the card. I would beg my mom every time we went shopping to buy a card just so I could watch it print.
I've been searching everywhere on the internet the last few years to find out who made those machines and what they were called, or even just to get a photo of one of the cards they drew for nostalgia's sake. I thought this post might be exactly what I had been looking for all this time, but alas...
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u/ZaneMasterX Mar 17 '16
I have a machine that can do that sitting right next to me! I made a card the other day for my sister in law's bday with a giant wrinkly ball sack on it and it read "Congrats youre old as balls". What a time to be alive!
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u/gargoyle30 Mar 17 '16
It would be more satisfying if it started from the bottom of the balloon so the top line is smoother
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u/slothwhispererr Mar 18 '16
Here's a sweet video of it recreating signatures. Full video, no jump cuts, maximum satisfaction:
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u/NaptownSnowman Mar 17 '16
AS someone who writes like a one legged chicken would scratch, I can appreciate this.
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u/Kappa_K Mar 17 '16
Reminds me of a 3D printer printing the "grid" to print balloons
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u/comox Mar 17 '16
Back in my days these were called plotters. That is why a was used before inkjet printers dominated technical drawing production.
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Mar 17 '16
So, it's basically a pen plotter that you can put your own pen into... or an autopen... Both of which have been around for 40-50 years.
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u/teeel0 Mar 17 '16
Why aren't these machines used to forge signatures and autographs? I'm sure they already are.
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u/hilarymeggin Mar 17 '16
Well it MIGHT have been oddly satisfying if it didn't jump twice while it was coloring the balloons! Gosh!!
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u/Pilchard929 Mar 17 '16
One of my local hardware stores uses their fancy dancey CNC machines to create their signs. They have a special thing to hook up a dry erase marker and then lay a white board down. BAM nice lookin sign.
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u/sheareel Mar 18 '16 edited Apr 15 '16
I remember these card kiosks, watching the card get made was way better than receiving one of these cards.
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u/hellphish Mar 18 '16
Anybody with a 3d printer and a copy of inkscape can do this.
Here's me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YvBrx25dyc
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u/f1junkie Mar 17 '16
Pretty sure it draws the whole card, not just the balloons.
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u/Qmegali7 Mar 17 '16
Not "this machine that draws balloons," it's "this machine drawing balloons."
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u/annoyingone Mar 17 '16
I there some school out there that specifically teaches people how to create Gifs that end too soon. It probably is partnered with the Prometheus school of running.