AS220 Labs produced a limited edition of 5 deluxe drawbot kits last month. We're going to see how it goes before doing another batch, so for now they're Sold Out. Here are the instructions for building the AS220 Labs drawbot kit.

This is kit version of the drawbot that is installed in AS220 Labs. This limited edition comes in a fancy laser cut wooden box. Put all the pieces together, mount it on a wall, put the Sharpie in the clip and you have a working drawbot!

The kit come fully soldered and tested. Right out of the box it will draw the shape that is on the box (a nice circular mandala shape).

No programming is necessary, although the drawbot is 100% Arduino-compatible and comes with a library that makes it easy to draw Bezier curves, circles, and move from one point to another. The board is based on the Sanguino board (www.sanguino.cc), so you have plenty of memory to work with (64k program space and 4K RAM). This is a limited edition with laser cut parts and custom circuit board; order yours in advance today! Kits will ship in early April.

Visit the AS220 Shop to reserve your own.

Debugging problems in an electronics project can be frustrating. When things don't work, they often just sit there and do nothing. Or sometimes, they will billow smoke. When writing firmware, you can sometimes find yourself creating elaborate debugging scaffolding to track down buggy code. Sometimes blinking LEDs and a serial connection are not the best tools for debugging.

Okay, I know that good debuggers exist for microcontrollers. But wouldn't it sometimes be easier to write your code in a familiar environment, debug on screen, then cut and paste into your Arduino code? That's where Processing -- a close relative of Arduino -- comes to the rescue!

The Arduino Integrated Development Environment and language forked from the Wiring project, which was the hardware-oriented twin of the Processing language and IDE. The similarities and compatabilities of the two projects are a Big Win for sketch developers.

We just received our first official AS220 Labs printed circuit boards in the mail. It is a version of Tom Igoe's 2-wire bipolar stepper motor control circuit used in the drawbot, for a future Make and Break workshop. I used Ladyada's PCB design hints and resources and chose the Gold Phoenix service. Cost: $89 for 90 boards.

The Drawbot is in the front window of a huge group show of work from the AS220 Print Shop. Over the course of the month it will draw an edition of "prints" of Erik Satie.

Download the Drawbot Arduino code here.

Arley took some photos of what the drawbot has been working on for the past month (random overlapping swishy cones):