Remember the Etch A Sketch? That red-framed toy where your “art” was either a squiggly mess or a rectangle-fest if you were lucky? Well, someone looked at it and thought, “What if this thing could crank out over 1,000 drawings a day?”

Enter EtchBot

The creators over at Every Flavor of Robot made something that’s taken this childhood relic and turned it into an absurdly fast, automated sketching machine. They documented their wild ride on their YouTube channel, and it’s as chaotic as you’d hope.

Darth Vader on an Etch a Sketch
Etch A Sketch visits the Dark Side, thanks to EtchBot.

The project is powered by an ESP32 microcontroller, integrating motor drivers, encoder inputs, and optional Raspberry Pi compatibility.

For them, what started as a hacky demo for a maker fair spiraled into a full-on obsession. They didn’t just stop at making it draw; they built a web interface to upload files, slapped on some clever programming to deal with mechanical quirks, and even made it erase itself (well, mostly — some features didn’t quite make the deadline).

Ups and Downs of X and Y

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. The Etch A Sketch’s two knobs (one for each axis) have a mind of their own thanks to something called “backlash,” a mechanical issue where the dials don’t always land where you think they will.
 

Etch A Sketch knob “backlash”
Measuring the effect of “backlash.”

To fix it, the team cooked up some smart code to compensate. The result? Drawings that look like they were made by someone who isn’t artistically challenged.

They showed off EtchBot at the OpenSauce maker fair, where it wowed crowds with its speed and precision. Even OpeanSauce creator William Osman stopped by — though not before the team sweated bullets over whether their creation would implode in front of him.

And in a fun twist, they brought in Princess Etch, a professional Etch A Sketch artist, to see how their robot stacked up. The verdict? She still wins at finesse and incredible detail, but she was genuinely impressed by the bot’s speed.

Comparison between EtchBot and Princess Etch’s drawings of American Gothic
EtchBot’s algorithm (left) needs a few tweaks to catch up to Princess Etch (right).

Try It Yourself!

EtchBot is open-source, meaning anyone can dive into the code (GitHub) and build one of their own. Whether you see it as art, engineering, or just an over-the-top way to relive your childhood, EtchBot is a brilliant mix of nostalgia and nerdiness.

Check out their latest video here:


Subscribe
Tag alert: Subscribe to the tag Embedded & AI and you will receive an e-mail as soon as a new item about it is published on our website!