About

Mat Gilbert is a software engineer and mad scientist living in Huntington, Vermont with his wife Monica and their cat Dusty.

In 2015 while working at Bond in NYC, Mat attended a fateful holiday planning party where the idea of a photo booth was brought up.

Mat suggested it would be epic for the company that used handwriting robots to habe the machines draw pictures of the people. Everybody laughed and said that would be cool, good luck!

Fortounately, Mat didn't give up. After a week or two of tinkering and advice from a few friends (Thanks Larry and Daniel) the original Facetrace was born.

A crude amalgam of jquery and duct tape, it provided a visual interface to a tool called Potrace. This magical black box of a library takes bitmap images in and spits vectors out the other side. The first version of facetrace was simply made to capture traces and stack them on a canvas, for export to SVG later.

Not only did it fucking work, but it worked in time for the party. And what a party it was. Even though we couldn't get the machines to write the pictures at the party, the event was the catalyst that started the fire that is Robot Draws You!

After creating a proof of concept, the idea grew from pictures to plotter art and eventually even maps. Processes for multiple colors, fill areas and other novel ideas made the project even more fun.

A shift in jobs and life meant an opportunity to move to Vermont. Robot Draws You! was accepted to the 2019 LaunchVT / Generator JumpStart program and the project was exposed to the reality of what it would take to beocme a real business.

Unfortounately, work and life has meant that Robot Rraws You took a backseat to paying the bills. Despite the setbacks the design for a new robot and a system to free the drawing process from the Cricut machine was hatched.

With the help of a few friends (Especially Tall Matt) a new machine was born and custom parts designed for the new pen mount. There the robot sat again for a few months as life had other plans.

Despite the setbacks this is a project that Mat just can't give up on.

The dream is to have a custom made robot with plans to come (avaialble on this website) with the option to purchase original artwork and maybe even parts for building your own machine.

Additionally, more work on the software is required to smooth the workflow of taking vector artwork and adapt it for pen plotters. The concept is there, it just needs to be articulated, ticketed out into work units and then effort put in by Mat and anybody else who wants to help.

In July 2022 Mat was working some less than ideal jobs and struggling with mental health. In a fit of energy and frustration this website was thrown together with as much existing assets as possible. The goal was to create an MVP site where people could look at the work, understand the project, and hopefully spend a few dollars to buy something to support the project.

If you read this far, thanks for hanging in there. My name is Mat Gilbert and this is Robot Draws You!