Switch Adapted Accessible Drawing Machine

Project Details
Overview
Tools
3D printing, Arduino, & C/C++, Thingiverse, & Claude AI
Timeline
Apr 2025 - Current
Team
Audrey Reiley
Kimberly Balcutt
Robert Zacharias
Working with faculty and students at The Watson Institute, a school that serves children with disabilities, we have developed a prototype drawing machine for students to use in art class and other creative contexts.
Our device allows a user-supplied drawing implement (marker, pen, pencil, etc.) to draw a user-selected line drawing, at a user-selected scale,
in a user-selected location on a sheet of paper.
While our device is intended for a particular audience with disabilities, by adding the facility of switch-adapting phone jacks, it is able to be easily reconfigured by many users for many possible purposes. For instance, it could become a device that multiple people collaborate to use simultaneously to make a shared drawing, or the inputs could each be driven by sensors/switches which are placed in different locations in a classroom or museum environment.