Twitch Does Art

This project was my team's submission to the Cornell University Make-a-thon where we were finalists. My partners Rohan Agarwal, Parker Miller, Andrew Tsai and I built a crowd-controlled robot that is capable of drawing on a canvas. We were inspired by the famous Twitch Plays Pokemon games where thousands of users collaborated on an IRC chat to control the main character in single player Pokemon games. The chat polled user responses over a time interval and committed the action that was most popular in the chat. What was really surprising about the Twitch Plays Pokemon experiments was that the games were always completed in about two weeks despite the large amounts of user input. My partners and I were inspired by this collaboration and we wanted to see if we would be able to replicate the results in an art context.

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Our robot is controlled by an ESP8266 WiFi Module, and the robot is powered by 9V batteries in parallel which is then stepped down by a buck converter. The ESP8266 controlled four servos which were connected to wheels and determined what direction the robot will move in and two servos which were connected to pens to bring the pens up or down. The ESP8266 then uses a series of GET requests every couple seconds to receive commands on the shape it needs to draw and the pen it needs to use. The server was built using Java Spark and gathered user input from a locally hosted webpage. The server would then tally up the user input and create a data packet to be retrieved by the ESP8266 module. I was personally responsible for designing the server and interfacing the ESP8266 with the server. Click on the Git logo to continue to the public repository where we have hosted the code for our server and robot as well as the mechanical plans for the robot.

The following is our video presentation at Cornell University Make-a-thon:

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