A few weeks ago the folks at DeepLocal sent me an email about Chalkbot – I took a look at the link to the web page about the robot and thought it was pretty interesting as they are often working on interesting projects. Fast forward a few weeks and the folks from DeepLocal and chalkbot have made the trip to Europe for the Tour de France. (I am really interested to know how one gets a robot to Europe).
Chalkbot as on commenter on CrunchGear put it is “a chalkjet printer, mega-sized and towed by a pick-up truck! Awesome!” Nike has taken chalkbot from Pittsburgh to the Tour de France to print out messages in chalk that users can submit on their website.
To see some great pictures of Chalkbot in action check out their twitpic photos and follow along on Twitter – www.twitter.com/chalkbot. You can also follow the Cahlkbot via DeepLocal’s David Evans who is blogging from France here – http://francebot.tumblr.com/ (Hi David!).
Here are the folks from DeepLocal talking about Chalkbot
Check out some of the early Chalkbot tests here –http://chalkbot.wordpress.com/. More coverage of Chalkbot from BikePgh and Pop City Media.
Even more related articles …
- Embrace the coming of Chalkbot (crunchgear.com)
- Hacking The Tour: Chalkbot (freshcreation.com)
- Tour de France chalkbot (makezine.com)
- The Livestrong Chalkbot (joshspear.com)
- Remainders – Things We Didn’t Post [Remainders] (gizmodo.com)
Actually, chalkbot's Pittsburgh roots are even deeper than Deep Local! The guys at Institute for Applied Autonomy have posted some information about the project's origins at http://www.appliedautonomy.com/chalkbot.html. Very cool project!