Making those ethereal long exposure photos where you 'paint' an image with an LED light requires a combination of artistic talent, skill, and patience. But if you're lacking all three, just order one of these $100 Thymio II robots, that can be easily programmed to do all the light painting for you.
Is some of the novelty and fascination of these kinds of photos lost when you hand off all the work to a perfectly precise robot? Maybe. But what you lose in artistic expression, you gain in wonderfully complex creations that can be reproduced again and again. So if the camera accidentally gets bumped mid-exposure, you can easily take it again from the top.
Just keep in mind that there is some programming know-how required here. You can't just sketch something in MS Paint and expect the robot to draw it out for you. But if you're not frightened by a little code, this seems like a neat way to take light painting to a whole new level. [Thymio & Aseba via IEEE Spectrum]