When the makers at Hacker House noticed that people were creating works of art by strapping lights to Roombas and capturing their movement with long exposure photography, they decided to do the same with a Raspberry Pi robot.

The so-called “Light Rover” is based on a Raspberry Pi 3 with two wheels topped with a Neopixel LED matrix. By programming the robot’s movement and the colours and positions of the LEDs, the team was able to create precise photographs instead of the beautiful chaos of the Roombas.

In the gallery below you can see the Light Rover itself as well as simple line art and a more complex piece of SpongeBob SquarePants.

As far as these kind of projects go, this really is a simple idea where execution is king. We hope this project will inspire others to give this kind of photography a try and – more importantly-  build more robots, because you can always have more robots.

To make your own version of this robot head on over to Instructables where you can find a full build guide as well as provided code and files to 3D print the chassis and wheels of the Light Rover.

There’s also a video below which gives you a quick look at how it’s made.