Making Robots ( from the trash )

Lefe Spietz is a physicist who specializes in turning old DVD drives from discarded computers into DIY home cuneiform printers.


With a little nail and a bit of clay, and the help of the code in a web browser. The dvd motors controls the motion of a little poking device or sharpie-marker to create any pattern you can think of.


Then once baked the clay coins can be pressed into more claydisks or into melted plastic to make an inverted version that can be painted or sanded.
While crude at this time (think dot matrix printers of the 90s) He has ambitions to create a system which teaches anyone to build experiment and document their learning process in transforming EWaste into Usesable
tools to promote human conviviality.

Here are some symbols using the dvd driver clay printer, that have been useful around the homestead



The website trashrobot.org has many fine writings on it. TrashMagicManifesto 2016, Geomatron 2020, and TrashMagic 2022 as well has how to build your own dvd drive clay printer

Neat, I cannot see how it works, but the fact it does is great.

"Cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing, was developed by the ancient Sumerian people of Mesopotamia.
Recognizable for its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, cuneiform was created using a blunt reed to press a design into the wet clay."

one could also instead of using a nail in clay could use a marker on a milk jug plastic