AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built a robot that draws caricatures with a Sharpie
Hi HN, I’ve been tinkering with this for a while and finally have it in a decent state. It’s a plotter robot that draws caricatures from photos. I trained a diffusion model (Flux Kontext LoRA) on caricature images, 3D-printed a Sharpie mount for my Ender 3, and hacked together a pipeline that goes photo → caricature → G-code. After a lot of trial and error it’s working pretty well, and I put up a little site where you can try it out. Happy to answer questions or hear any feedback. Thanks!
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.
2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →
- 2
Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me. The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know. Cheers!
2025 · muffinman.io · its alternatives →
- 3
A story about replacing a creative workflow and focusing on another.
20d ago · shannadige.com · its alternatives →
- 4
2018 · erkaman.github.io · its alternatives →
- 5
GIF.new▲18i use GIFs a lot in my personal/professional life and so I'm pretty passionate about the topic :P about a month ago I found out that this domain was available and couldn't believe it. Waited a good 3 weeks to pull the trigger on buying it (which, btw is hella expensive by default) and in the meantime, hopped from one idea to another on what it should house. original idea was to build some kind of prompt-to-GIF service but very soon realised that i can't sustain the AI bill on my budget (top contender was to use runway). then came the idea of animating charts from data (obvious: i work…
2025 · gif.new · its alternatives →
- 6MW
http://imagestash.org/ Kind of like Instapaper for images. While surfing at home one evening I found the perfect desktop background ... for my work machine. I got to pondering the quickest way to save a random image so I could get to it on all of my devices, got a wee bit carried away with the technical possibilities, and this was the result. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!
2011 · imagestash.org · its alternatives →
- 7
GPT Image▲14Hey HN, I built a web tool that wraps the latest AI image generation models with a conversational interface. The main idea is you can iterate on images through natural dialogue instead of rewriting prompts from scratch each time. Key features I focused on: - Multi-turn editing (the AI remembers previous context) - Character/style consistency across multiple images - Multi-image fusion Not affiliated with OpenAI – the name is just a playful nod. Would love feedback from this community, especially on the UX and what features would be useful for technical users. Try it:…
2025 · gptimage.ai · its alternatives →
- 8YC
I wouldn't throw away the diffusion models just yet though. ``` prompt: Show me an example of ASCII art, depicting a cat. response: /_/\ / o o \ ( " ) ~()~/ / \ | | / | | \ / ~~/ / | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 9
My focus has been shifting towards the ML alignment space recently, and in particular the ability to translate large transformer models into human understandable circuits and algorithms. This problem potentially isn't solvable, but it is one that some groups have had success with after large amounts of effort. In attempting to address this issue, I've been developing Transpector. A tool scaling up and reducing the barrier to entry of techniques that these teams have been showing success with. Techniques aiming to understand the internal mechanics of the model. Currently this tool is focused…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Saw the remotion claude skills launch earlier, and honestly even though I was surprised how decent some of the results turned out to be I ended up never trying it out with claude code because I knew I'd have to setup remotion, bundler etc and if I was already doing it once I thought I might as well turn it into a site where anyone could just write messages and get a video without any prerequisites. I also know Claude Code is not something everyone has and setting up remotion is a pain. And one of the biggest lessons I learned from this whole experience is that Opus is actually not that good…
Feb 2026 · framecall.com · its alternatives →
- 11IB
I was trying to build a website for sharing robotics projects and realized the coolest way to visualize a robot is in 3D. I could only find a few open-source projects that did this, but each was for a specific environment (think MJCF vs URDF vs USD) and some were damn hard to run. I know Next.js so I decided to merge them all and call it mechaverse. I wanna fix bugs and make the viewers faster so please test it and break it.
2025 · mechaverse.dev · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi HN, I’ve spent the last decade building hardware products like humanoid robots, 3D printers, and self-driving tractors. I needed a tool to navigate technical documents faster, so I created one with friends. This tool helps with component search, cross-referencing, comparison, and debugging. We’d love your feedback, whether you find it useful or not. Thank you! Try it here: www.convergelab.ai
2024 · convergelab.ai · its alternatives →
- 13
Hey there, everyone! I'm super excited to introduce myself. You see, my creator was on a hunt for a slicing tool. He just needed to do some simple picture modifications. But boy, those heavy-duty software were such a pain, way too complex for his simple needs. And the lightweight ones? They often let him down. So, he decided to bring me to life! I might be small, but I'm here to lend you a huge helping hand! Now, let me tell you about my current core features: 1. Simple Image Editor: I've tried really hard to keep things basic. I only offer the essential tools. Right now, there are just some…
Jun 2026 · gridmaker.design · its alternatives →
- 14SS
I’ve spent the last month or so hacking on a prototype to let filmmakers make concept art more quickly with recent generative image tools. This is very much a beta—with current functionality you can make projects, generate shots, and upload scripts which we can process into shotlists. Features I’m working on as we speak: character consistency, location consistency, framing and composing shots. Let me know what you think or what else I should build!
2024 · storyboarder.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 15AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com · its alternatives →
- 16
process demo - https://i.redd.it/fbhlwsq1gcmg1.gif render demo - https://i.redd.it/smddwtryhcmg1.gif I love making creative software. I spent a few years making pixel art software but recently have gotten into 3d animation and 2d animation and really wanted a way to realize crazy ideas. Blockbench didn't feel quite right, spline is super well made but felt catered too much to just idle website animations, and I really didn't want to fall down a master class in Blender just to make some silly stuff. While I'm definitely not discounting Blender's literal…
Mar 2026 · app.topomaker.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi, all I worked on this tool a couple of months. I always had trouble creating a logo for my next project so I decided to automate it. Appreciate any feedback. Cheers, Dan
2024 · logo-ship.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey everyone! I'm excited to share Trangram, a completely free tool for animation and illustration that works right in your browser, no installs or sign-ups needed. I originally created Trangram to make motion graphics easier for myself, and as I kept working on it, I realized it could be useful for others too. It's been a fun side project, and I've used it to create my own animations, which you can check out on Trangram's gallery page. Since my first post here 6 months ago, I've made lots of updates. Want to see what's new over the past 6 months? Check it out here:…
2024 · trangram.com · its alternatives →
- 19IB
I had 14,000 photos sitting on a drive and wanted an excuse to play with local vision models and Elixir/Phoenix. I originally tried to get LLaVA to tell me if a photo was 'good' or matched my style, but quickly learned that LLMs have terrible taste. I ended up demoting the LLM to just extract metadata, and built a custom CLIP/Ridge Regression pipeline to actually learn my preferences based on how I rate things. The stack is Phoenix/Oban on the orchestrator side, and Python/FastAPI/Instructor for the AI workers. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture,…
Apr 2026 · qwelian.com · its alternatives →
- 20DC
Hi there! I'm building Diagrammatic, a simple and free online tool with the ambition to become a community for diagrams-as-code enthusiasts. Currently, it supports Mermaid, PlantUML, Dot (Graphviz), Vega-Lite, and Typogram, but I'm looking to add more languages. Please let me know if there's a particular one you use. I'd appreciate any kind of constructive feedback as well. Thanks in advance!
2024 · diagrammatic.com · its alternatives →
- 21LT
Hey I'm Kieran and I've been playing with the intersection (pun intended) of generative AI and civil engineering for roadways. I did a test run training a LoRA on the new Flux 2 Dev model using Fal's trainer useing a custom dataset of paired images from publicly available striping CAD drawings of street layouts to aerial images of the same area. The use case here is to allow urban planners to instantly visualize their proposed changes as they work with their existing tooling. This was just a quick experiment with a small data size that exceeded my expectations so I wanted to share with you…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 22
I've just revamped my website for image-to-image conversion called Ekpic and would love to get your feedback on the new version. I have not visitors nor anything, but hey, whatever . In any case, I wanted to have good metrics for speed. I just changed the framework to astro. Still various modifications to do. All images are converted locally, that's one of the reasons I created the site. Also, I wanted something a bit more modern than the standard.
2025 · ekpic.com · its alternatives →
- 23IJ
Hey everyone, I'm excited to share a brand new side project I just finished building: phototopixel.art. It's a simple web tool that automatically converts any photo you upload into pixel art. I've always been a fan of the aesthetic of pixel art, but manually creating it is a tedious process. After trying out some existing tools and not being fully satisfied with the results, I decided to build my own. My goal was to create a fast and easy-to-use solution that consistently produces great-looking pixel art. Behind the Scenes The core of the tool uses a combination of color quantization and…
2025 · phototopixel.art · its alternatives →
- 24
Hey Hacker News, thought I'd share an open-source tool I recently released for generating pixel art with AI. All models are trained on royalty free / CC0 datasets /w permission from the owners! Let me know if you have any feedback. Eager to see what you create! Feel free to tag me on twitter @dparksdev if you create something cool.
2023 · pixelfy.ai · its alternatives →
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- my weekend project, Imagestash - a bookmarklet+ for image collectors alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →