Few toys are extra iconic than the Etch A Sketch, which has been in style for 65 years now. In that point, greater than 100 million items have been bought worldwide. And each single certainly one of them has had the identical drawback: the dearth of an “undo” button. For those who mess up your masterpiece, your solely selection is to present the Etch A Sketch shake and begin over. That’s an unavoidable results of the Etch A Sketch’s drawing mechanism, which Tekavou overcame by constructing a digital “Teka-Sketch.”
An Etch A Sketch is a two-dimensional operated by hand cable-driven plotter with a stylus that scrapes a whitish aluminum powder off the display screen, leaving a clear line that appears darkish as a result of the inside of the enclosure is unlit. If you shake the entire thing, the aluminum powder sticks again onto the display screen and “erases” your entire drawing. That mechanism doesn’t depart room for a easy answer for erasing parts of strains, which is why advanced drawings induce a lot anxiousness.
The Teka-Sketch is a digital system and it could possibly arbitrarily draw or erase strains in no matter method its programming dictates. On this case, Tekavou saved it easy and mimicked a lot of the performance of an Etch A Sketch. There are nonetheless two knobs to manage motion of the digital stylus within the X and Y axes, and it nonetheless attracts straight darkish strains on a whitish background. The large change is the introduction of an “undo” button (clicking the left knob), which erases the newest few centimeters of the road.
The important thing part within the Teka-Sketch is an Inkplate 6 from a model referred to as Soldered Electronics. The fundamental unit combines a high-quality 6” e-paper show with an ESP32 microcontroller, and there are additionally packages accessible with an enclosure and battery. Tekavou merely added a few rotary encoders and packed every thing right into a customized 3D-printed enclosure. Every part else was coding, which Tekavou first began studying as a child after discovering NIBBLES.BAS —a Snake variant programmed in QBasic.
As an homage to that formative expertise, Tekavou created a Nibbles recreation that runs on the Teka-Sketch. It even has a two-player mode, with two onscreen snakes (one managed by the left knob and one managed by the appropriate knob). E-paper screens are infamous for poor refresh charges, which is why they aren’t extra frequent, however the Inkplate 6’s display screen has partial refresh charges quick sufficient to make the sport completely playable.
Now Tekavou’s personal children can share among the experiences he had as a baby, however in a method that has been improved with expertise.
