In a video uploaded on June 8, Dutch YouTuber Sten, a Lego devotee who runs the Inventive Mindstorms channel on the social media platform, chronicles the creation of the Pixelbot 3000, from constructing its mechanism to ‘printing’ the ultimate product.
The Pixelbot is basically a next-level model of the Bricasso printer, developed about 9 years in the past by JK Brickworks. Constructed solely from Lego elements, the Bricasso scanned a pre-pixelated supply picture and saved it to a Lego Mindstorms EV3 unit. The saved information was then used to provide a mosaic utilizing 1 x 1 bricks. Mindstorms, which has been discontinued, was launched as an academic package for constructing programmable robots from Lego bricks and elements.
The creation of the Pixelbot concerned loads of trial and error, one thing Sten repeatedly makes clear all through the video.
“So, the plan is to make an AI picture generator, and I used to be considering it could be a good suggestion to make use of these 16 x 16 base plates after which make a pixel artwork out of these little 1 x 1 plates,” he says in the beginning of the video.
Inventive Mindstorms
Just a few days later, after “reconsidering”, he began over, changing the 16 x 16 base plate with a 32 x 32 one because it produced a superior picture. Just a few days after that, the unique rack and pinion mechanism that moved the platform was changed by screw items. After perfecting the system, Sten labored on the software program that drives it.
Quite than utilizing a pre-pixelated scanned picture just like the Bricasso, Open AI’s DALL-E 3 generates a cartoon-like picture that’s ‘printed’ as a mosaic. Utilizing Python, the YouTuber wrote code that divided the high-resolution, 1024 x 1024 supply picture right into a 32 x 32 grid and picked the colour of the middle pixel of every house to enhance the sharpness of the ensuing mosaic.
Nonetheless, that was nonetheless too many coloration values for Pixelbot to deal with (Lego solely has 70 colours), so Sten made the machine go over each pixel within the supply picture, select the closest coloration, and change it with a Lego-friendly coloration.
World’s Finest AI LEGO Robotic!
As a result of the machine must be ultra-precise when inserting its bricks, Sten added contact sensors. After trialing the robotic, he observed that the bricks ran out shortly, so he added a “high quality of life characteristic”: coding that made the system cease when it ran out of any coloration.
The ultimate step was selecting a picture to ‘print’. Sten left that call as much as his different creation, Dave, the world’s first AI-powered Lego robotic head. Dave determined the picture must be of a ‘quirky robotic holding a sunflower.’
You possibly can watch the 15-minute video of the Pixelbot 3000’s creation, together with seeing how the ultimate Lego mosaic picture turned out, under. The Pixelbot 3000 code is obtainable for obtain on GitHub.
I made an AI LEGO® PixelArt Robotic