jcwarnerdev Blog Title: XY Drawing Plotter (part 3) - Mark Rober Creative Engineering Course (part 3)
Beauty and Success in Failure and Iteration
I managed to get my plotter working enough to get a few drawings out of it. In the spirit of the assignment I arranged my failings and iterations in a way to derive an artful and hopefully inspiring meaning.
This project brought about many many failures. The first to produce any visible output is the center drawing which contains all of my test lines and calibrations. This morning when I thought I had most of the kinks worked out I decided to put a test image on the paper.
You can see that image turned out very dark. In fact, when I sent the image to the printer I thought I was going to get a solid black rectangle. As the image revealed itself my spirits were lifted only to be tempered when one motor failed to stay in step.
The smaller bottom left and top right images were iterations on the initial test design. The bottom left was my second attempt and it’s difficult to make out what was being drawn. The top right is a bit more in focus. These three drawings together can symbolize the synthesis of an idea; loose and nebulous to start, becoming clearer given time and attention.
The larger bottom and top drawings carry a similar message. Failure is part of the process! The bottom image suffered from a sudden motor misalignment. Failures are something to iterate from. In my experience, they are probably the number one thing to iterate from.
What’s not clear in the images is that even though the top astronaut shows few obvious imperfections, that is only the case because of constant care from an external observer. I had motor skips that would have been catastrophic had I not watched every line be drawn. This has clear parallels with our current presence in space.
Finally, these drawings are positioned next to an aerial view earth (I snipped it from a video I took on my one and only skydiving jump). Humans endlessly look up and have ambition towards more. Fly with the birds, study the stars, visit our neighbors. None of these happened in one go. All took effort and saw countless failures. Yet, we succeeded. And so shall we continue on.