Sometimes you need to find your center through the calm relaxation of a Zen Garden. But you’re too busy to stop and play in the sand. Enter the Autonomous Zen Garden.

I use a cheap 3D printer and some excess free time to automate a desktop Zen Garden. Calmness, mindfulness, and serenity can now be achieved all while doing something else. Some call it a waste of time. Others, subtle genius. It’s probably the former, but stay a while and find out.

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35 Comments

  1. The way you looked into the camera with your creation that your explaining next to you in a relatively white room reminded me about this guy: https://youtu.be/kjQlczb18ds

    This made me think, now that you have a 3D printer, may in interest you in starting your robot combat career?

  2. 4:08 Could this maybe be fixed with a pull down resistor? I'm not at all an electrical engineer but I had an Arduino class at school and when you hook up a switch to an input you have to use a pull down resistor otherwise the voltage stays high after you let go of the switch so you need a ground to send it to. I imagine what might be going on in the magnet is similar to this??? I also noticed here you removed the positive side so I wonder what would happen if instead you removed the negative side and then grounded it. But I also know electromagnets need a current to work not just a voltage so I'm probably completely wrong and this is a completely unrelated phenomena.

  3. So much here I want to correct but ill bite my tongue. Ill just say G-code is only a set of instructions that Marlin uses to give commands. Marlin is the firmware/software of the controller.

  4. nice! next make a real zen garden where you place the pieces and the robot dynamically draws non-overlapping patterns around them

  5. Cool way to use a 3d printer. Unfortunately your terminology and obvious lack of 3d printer knowledge makes me cringe. I hope ppl take this with a grain of salt and it shows how a fresh pair of eyes can make things different although not in a bad way.

  6. I'm glad to see technology be what I thought it should have been 20 years ago. Only problem now is finding what you want to do. Maybe in 20 more years life would be the way I always thought it should have been.

  7. 3:04 constraining the Z-axis like that can actually be really hurtful to 3D prints. Your application didn't require a too high level of precision, but with these cheaper printers it's not guaranteed that the rod is 100% straight, causing the gantry to shift significantly when you get closer to the center of the rod.

  8. G code does have loops and even functions. The simple stuff implemented in printers however usually do not.
    It's a subset or offshoot at best.

  9. you could also turn it back into a printer, print off pieces for the garden and then go back to garden

  10. Have you seen v1 engineering zen robot? It does this underneath a glass table. You can let it draw different stuff all day and watch the table change garden.

  11. Not that it would be relevant for you, but the constraint of the extra z axis bearing would actually reduce the print quality since the lead screw is that wobbly, and constraining it would transfer that to the print.

  12. Doesn’t automating a zen garden defeat the purpose of it? Or was this sarcastic portrayed so seriously that the joke went over my head?

  13. This makes perfect sense to a engineer a robot work properly is more relaxing than anything else.

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