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.
