Maker Jeremy S. Cook has experimented with both CNC machinery and light painting in the past, and decided to combine these two skills into a new artistic device. 

His setup uses a web app found here to program a CNC router as a sort of dot matrix printer. But instead of a pen, pencil, brush or other marking utensil, it uses a button as an input to the onboard Arduino Nano when pressed to the router’s surface.

From this input, the Arduino then commands a diffused RGB LED to “mark” the surface with light, painting an image on the camera’s exposed sensor. 

Code and print files are are available on GitHub if you’d like to try your own light art experiments!