Blot is a plotter bot from Hack Club. The TeleBlot Site encourages Hack Clubbers to create with Blot by lowering the barrier for Hack Clubbers to see their Blot works drawn on a Blot machine. Hack Clubbers can upload code to the website and watch through a livestream as a remote blot machine (the TeleBlot) draws their code.
- Raspberry Pi Model B (RPi)
- LCD Writing Tablet (modified)
- USB Webcam (generic)
- Blot from Hack Club
The setup requires:
- RPi connected to WiFi
- USB Webcam and Blot connected to RPi through USB
- LCD Writing Tablet connected to RPi through GPIO (connect the tablet's ground wire to the RPi's ground GPIO pin and the tablet's postive wire to the RPi's BOARD_PIN GPIO, default: 7)
- Position the USB Webcam to look at the LCD Writing Tablet
On the RPi in the headless-blot
directory run:
yarn install
sudo apt-get install motion
sudo chown motion:motion /etc/motion
sudo cp motion.conf /etc/motion/motion.conf
- Start the Motion daemon:
sudo systemctl start motion
- Start the server:
yarn run
- To test, upload a blot code file (.js) to the "Teleblot" Slack Bot on the Hack Club Slack, you should receive 1) a video of the Blot drawing your sketch and 2) an image of the result.
- Any changes to motion.conf must be copied to:
sudo cp motion.conf /etc/motion/motion.conf
and the Motion daemon restarted:sudo systemctl start motion
- Once started, the Motion daemon will run automatically in the background, even after restarting the RPi
- The USB webcam livestream can be found at http://<rpi_ip>:8081 and exposed externally with a reverse proxy such as LocalXpose