I figured not much could be scarier than my own face on a Halloween pumpkin, so I set out to carve my face on a pumpkin using Lumenlab’s DIY RoGR Robot kit.
The first issue was to get a head shot. They say beauty and brains don’t go together; they were wrong twice!
Next was to create the g-code to run the robot. We use the incredibly great open source software called “EMC2” as our machine controller, which just so happens to come with a great little program called “Image to gcode” that let’s you go from a grayscale indexed image to a depthmap g-code. Basically I used the Gimp to index the above image to 8 shades of gray, then imported the image to EMC2 with Image to g-code. Nothing to it!
Next was to get the pumpkin on the RoGR (Lumenlab’s Robloks Gantry Robot)…
The amount of Z clearance is rather huge for a big gourd, but the RoGR is not a normal “CNC mill”. The RoGR was designed to be a modular robotics manufacturing platform, and one of the things I was sure to build into the machine was the ability to easily raise and lower the working platform. In less than 5 minutes, my coworker and I had the bed dropped and the pumpkin mounted.
I then imported my indexed PNG to EMC2. The generated tool paths look like this:
Nothing left but to fire it up! The job was run at 120IPM and took about 20 minutes to complete.
EW!
Hard to believe that’s me!
Here’s a video!
I used an air nozzle to blow the puree out of the carving. It was the consistency of baby food. When it was all said and done, I think it came out great! You can learn more about RoGR in the forums.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:41 am
[...] do hardware geeks carve pumpkins? With giant home made CNC mills, that’s how. Using the open source CNC kit from Lumenlab.com, they converted a photograph [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Since a pumpkin is not flat, did the tool adapt the working depth to the pumpkin surface?
October 29th, 2008 at 11:52 am
I see that the depth map has a flat background… Could you have summed it with a depth map of the surface of the pumpkin? You might have got better contrast around the edges of the picture that way.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
[...] be carving pumpkins the modern way! Lumenlab is bringing digital making to the masses. See the post at Lumenlab.com, complete with video. Posted by Tracy Sigler, October 29, 2008 1:11 pm - Permalink [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Awesome! Thanks for the mini-tutorial.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
[...] CNC Pumpkin Carving by Lumenlab’s RoGR Robot [Thanks, Mister J!] [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
[...] Ideally this should be done with some sort of CNC router… much like the guys at LumenLab have done: [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 6:47 am
[...] kids than naff old triangular eyes. [Lumenlab via [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I’m officially jealous. I had to carve my own face on a pumpkin the hard way.
http://www.saddlesores.org/pumpkins
October 30th, 2008 at 11:00 am
[...] more likely to put the wind up visiting kids than naff old triangular eyes. [Lumenlab via [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
[...] Much more likely to put the wind up visiting kids than naff old triangular eyes. [Lumenlab via [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
[...] Lasers + Squash = fun! We thought we were pretty clever when we put this together: Happy Halloween from Etchstar. However, we discovered someone at Lumenlab using computer mapping technology and taking it to a whole new level by carving his portrait onto his pumpkin with a RoGR Robot kit. Check it out here. [...]
October 31st, 2008 at 12:44 am
That was cool! My kind of guy!
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Awesome. My question is… was it as easy as you made it sound?
November 4th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
[...] more likely to put the wind up visiting kids than naff old triangular eyes. [Lumenlab via [...]
November 10th, 2008 at 8:04 am
[...] Halloween: Man kann sich seine Kürbisse auch per Roboter schnitzen lassen. Auch haben [...]
November 13th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
[...] more likely to put the wind up visiting kids than naff old triangular eyes. [Lumenlab via [...]
November 24th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[...] the pumpkin pie i’ll be having on thursday. How do hardware geeks carve pumpkins? With giant home made CNC mills, that’s how. Using the open source CNC kit from Lumenlab.com, they converted a photograph into [...]