Escher – a cloud-controlled Etch-a-Sketch #IoT #InternetOfThings @Medium

Matt Welsh writes on Medium about Escher, the world’s first cloud-controlled Etch-a-Sketch.

For the last year, I’ve been working on a side project at home which I call Escher. It’s a robotic Etch-a-Sketch that can be controlled over the Internet from anywhere in the world. It’s made possible by the Adafruit Feather HUZZAH32 development board, and Google Firebase to provide the control between the Etch-a-Sketch and a web client.

While there are a bunch of Arduino and Raspberry Pi-controlled Etch-a-Sketch projects out there, I wanted to build something that anyone could walk up to and use just by visiting a web page from their phone.

Hardware

Escher is controlled by an Adafruit Feather HUZZAH32 development board, which features an ESP32 processor running at 240MHz, 520KB of SRAM, 4MB of flash, and integrated 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth. This is a great little development board that is fully supported by the Arduino programming environment.

Escher uses two NEMA17 stepper motors to control the knobs of the Etch-a-Sketch. These are controlled using the Adafruit Motor Featherwing board, making it easy to control each stepper motor either independently or together.

See the whole project in the post here.