Last flight to Los Angeles for the season. Battle commences again Jan 2. Ech. So as it turns out I own a sisyphus table.
It's got patterns. You can download more patterns. You can also program patterns although it isn't straightforward. Mostly you build playlists with an app and they play one into another. The random meshing of two or more patterns pretty much gives you what you see. I'd been following Bruce Shapiro for a few years; he made these things for museums every now and then. Sometime around 2012 he said "sign up here if you'd like to be notified if I ever commercialize these things". Like 3 years pass and all of a sudden there's a kickstarter. I own 3' table number 2.
From the video I was expecting something like Turtle graphics except the pen can't be raised, but the site says it just takes an SVG preferably containing a single path.You can also program patterns although it isn't straightforward.
It probably is turtle graphics underneath; I think the original design is pushing 15 years old now and most of his programming has been polar interpolations. Prior to commercializing the tables he commercialized the eggbot so polar hijinks are kind of his thing. I mean, how much room would a RaspPi utility to turn an SVG into polar coordinates really take up?