Category: plots

54 Articles
aesthetics, plots, plotters

7 days, 47438 pen strokes :\. Lara’s work and a recurring dragon on this blog :). I sped up the machine to make it 7 days instead of 10, so it’s slightly more inaccurate, but more importantly I failed to anticipate that ink would run out faster. I used to have about 1.5 days between pen swaps, here it’s barely above 1 day. No harm done I got there in time, but I should have thought about it when I adjusted speed.

I lined it up with a big public event and tons of people got to see it.

No sure if there’s anything more to say about lasers & post-it portraits, it was the now usual formula. I’ve enhanced the pipeline some to do auto-face-cropping as it is a step we usually waste lots of time on. Esther & I rehearsed over the week end. She runs the operation during the event.

Some recurring questions I get asked at these events:

“What are the machines for normally?” Nothing, their sole purpose is to drag pens and shine cat lasers.

“Is this your job?” Nope, just a side quest.

“So how does this work?” I try to see what part they’re interested in before I launch into a 3 hour tirade :).

“Did you build this?” yes.

It’s very gratifying to see people stare at your work for a while. You can see the gears turning in their heads. I’ll sit by the big machine sometimes to watch people’s reaction to it. When I swap its pen people will come up and tell me how much they like it. I’m just glad for having the opportunity to do something cool in the world.

electronics, plots, plotters

I was invited back to the science museum to do something cool with my machines. Any time I do a public event it’s an opportunity to figure out what’s engaging and do better the next time around.

I was maybe a little too motivated and brought several machines, almost my whole apparatus, and deployed them in various modes. 1 PewtyBot, 1 Mirror PewtyBot, 1 PlottyBot & 1 SkecthyBot doing portraits, and 1 PewtyBot people could control with their phones. The laser portraits worked wonders again, but the original PlottyBot drawing post-it portraits worked even better.

People were clearly keen on getting a tangible souvenir from the evening. Having a robot draw their portraits on a Post-it note struck a chord hard. I think what I’ve learned from this event is that while the lasers throw a lot of pazzazz at you, they are more complex machines that most people don’t try to engage with beyond taking in the light show. While a pen based machine is doing the same thing you’d do with your hand so it’s more approachable to be curious about. As usual a small fraction of them were fixated beyond reason on watching the machine at work. There has to be a “drawing automaton obsession” gene present in ~10% of the population.

Unfortunately, I only had one PlottyBot doing the Post-it portraits, and they take much longer than the lasers so I spent much of the evening trying to keep track of a queue of people who wanted one.

I built 2 4’x4′ photoluminescent paper holders so I could deploy this easier. In the past, finding a decent spot on a wall for the rolls and unrolling them was difficult and time consuming. I also have plans for doing random outside events at dusk in random places this Summer, which is why having something deployable was worth the construction effort. I tried it some already at home last Summer and it’s kind of cool to have the lasers go on a warm Summer night.

I had several people ask me if this was AI :), this seems to have become the go-to explanation for anything tech based that can’t be explained easily. Much like Clarke’s law that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, only now it’s AI instead of magic. I’d respond that it was just good old organic grain-raised free-range “I”.

As usual, it was very hard to capture the coolness while manning it so I don’t have much visuals to represent what went on. Ultimately it’s just me running 5 machines, a software stack and talking a lot. Suffice it to say people were into it and I’m emboldened to keep trying public events. Fun times!

plots

Mostly tests meant for a larger format, I like to post them for reference.

aesthetics, plots

I almost didn’t run this one, it ended up being my magnum opus. It took ~180 hours and 8 pens. Unfortunately, even though I have strict protocols for marking pens which aren’t full, I had it go over the week end with one that had been used before and ran blank for a bit. It’s ok, these monster plots come with imperfections.

The detail is great, and the AI coded inset fill algorithm really shines. It’s the first time I find a non living subject that projects a compelling presence in the room. But maybe that’s only because I’m a sucker for old stoves.

I found the image in a 1902 edition of the Sears catalog where they sold it for $14.95. I consider it an expression of culture, from a time when anything we created came with ornaments. It shines all the more in a modern building with very clean and sanitized architecture.

aesthetics, plots

I have a penchant for Vermont seals & coats of arm, and I found some good ones in some old books. I really like turning old engravings into large plots, these look great in person.

The new recursive inset fill algorithm is incredible and making me want to revisit previously hatched plots.

aesthetics, AI, plots

I’m plotting again after an August hiatus. The new Gondola Plotter is super quiet, so nice! I’ve made a few refinements to the software stack of course… The usual.

I found a bunch of really cool engravings in some very old books I found in the abandoned house. These books are worthy of some discussion on their own much like the old vinyls, but this isn’t the time.

I got ChatGPT to make me a few SVG handling tools that are really incredibly well done and will help me shed some of the apps I was using. With SVGs there really is not a single app that does all the things, so I drag a collection around just to use 1 or 2 of their function. AI is helping me write scripts to explore algorithms and replace more trivial functionality from apps.

Case in point: this super cool recursive inset fill algorithm to turn fills into something a plotter can do.

I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while, but I knew it’d take me a good few days to nail it. That got turned into 30 minutes with AI. Jaw dropping. I love the effect as it echoes a lot of bored fillings of shapes I’d do as a kid getting bored in class. The cookstove above is filled with it, but it’s far too dense at this size and so it really looks like a actual fill rather than a particular effect.

A lot of my tooling these days is Python which has good libraries for handling SVGs. I used to dislike Python for their dumb purist move from 2.7 to 3 which wasted everyone’s time, and because they had managed to reimplement library hell. But I have to say venv is a successful redress to the later.

plots

I launched another big plot, it was a 7 day one, I swapped the servo motor for the occasion to reset the pen up/down cycles it would have, but that was a bad idea. I think I’ve learned it’s better to stick with a lucky servo that keeps performing. And so on day 5, the new servo failed. So I stopped things early, the plot still looks pretty good, you might recognize it from this post.

Bellow is the unfortunate artifact of a pen that doesn’t go off the paper. Another interesting thing I’ve learned from these large deployments, is that the slight misalignment I keep having from one plot to the next, but not enough to be a real bother, I think is due to the paper or the belts loosening over the days.

An so I bought a couple of very premium servos, it’s time to get hardware in line with the ambition. I’m hoping they’ll make a difference. They better.

aesthetics, all out geekery, electronics, plots, plotters

I had a chance to run 2 Pewtybots at a public event where people could have their picture taken to be turned into line art to be rendered by lasers. I should have taken better pictures and videos, but I was too busy manning the station and talking to people. It’s unfortunate because it’s hard to convey the experience with words.

Ever since the first successful prototype, I kind of knew I wanted to do something for this event. And so I built 2 machines, refined the software, the math… well maybe that’ll be another post… I’m not sure I have it right just yet, I might. I have it right enough at least, let’s just say I refined the math. Finally, I spent time developing and practicing a pipeline where I can take someone’s picture and send it to either Pewtybot happens to be idle.

Esther helped man the station so we practiced at home with all her toys pretending to be the various personalities she’d encounter at such an event. From the overly curious bear to the llama in a hurry. And so the pipeline is as such: first we take your picture. A monitor is facing you to see what it is.

Then we turn that into lines to be drawn (or lasered in this case). This is supposed to be a first taste of eye candy as these algorithms are cool to see at work.

Then you go in a dark room, and see it all get zapped on the wall (I don’t have a picture of the lasered dog plush).

Because this was a first on many fronts, I was pretty anxious some things would go wrong (they did). I also didn’t know how to present it, or how people would react. So the first couple of “customers” helped me figure out how to guide them through the pipeline. And when the time comes to go in the dark room, I purposefully kind of dump people in there and vaguely tell them to wait for the wall to light up. I have the laser write their name and count down from 3 to 1, and then the laser moves much faster through their portrait.

Nicole quickly realized adding chairs in the dark room would invite people to take in the experience more. And I realized I was silly to tune my setting for single portraits, I almost exclusively had families and groups of friends in the same picture. The reactions were great, although I didn’t get any from inside the room, people coming out were full of questions and kids were smiling. As always with my silly projects, there’s also a smaller fraction of people with whom they resonate more deeply.

Overall it was a big success and pretty smooth for a first. I want to do more for sure. There’s something fireworksy about when the laser really starts moving and light shows up everywhere.

plots, plotters

I’ve been revamping and refactoring the software stack for plotty… pewty… gondola plotty… etchy? bot. Everytime a new riff on drawing machines came up, I’d grab the last code I worked on and tailored it for the new endeavor, often adding generalizable improvements along the way, but never taking the time to refactor previous work.

I always try to be helpful when people reach out on this blog about something they need/want/would like, but I have limited time and I’ve learned to filter a bit and not let other people’s projects take too much of my time. Last December though, the folks from Code Club Luxembourg got in touch with a few questions, and I gave them the usual “helpful but not too much” filter. Except they went on to build 5 PlottyBots, a whole integration with Scratch, and now use it to teach coding. Music to my ears, and clearly they meant business. And so we hopped on a call to exchange ideas.

Clearly the software could use consistency and so I started thinking holistically with the laser code. Each machine has slightly different motor control, but it’s now evident which software pieces are consistent across implementations. Ideally, I’d like the same software stack no matter which machine you happen to be running on. So I refactored back to the gondola plotter, and finally the tabletop one. It’s still not finished but it’s definitely better and more consistent.

To test new software on the original PlottyBot, I ran it on my reMarkable tablet.

I’m not going to do a whole post dedicated to its merits, I’m allergic to promotional content, but I will say a quick few things on this unrelated post. I’ve been interested in Eink for the longest time but never found a compelling device I felt was more than a temporary gimmick. Even getting a pricy reMarkable was a bit of an experiment that could land in a closet gathering dust. But I did want to experiment with quieter and purpose targeted devices so I went on with it after more than a decade of seeing various Eink devices go by. I haven’t adopted it for everything I want to yet, it takes time to change long established work habits, but I will say that it absolutely NAILS writing. It nails it so hard it changed the way I problem solve to an earlier saner process. It might be a generational thing, but writing is key to information absorption and processing for me. The problem with paper is that I have pieces flying everywhere, and mistakes make for an unclean train of thought committed to paper which is frustrating to engage with further. With Eink writing, you get an infinite canvas, and the ability to massage thoughts into a perfect form, one ripe for implementation. I have found that I will pick this device with a sense of relief as it means I’m about to engage in uninterrupted deep thinking. I find many signs that it was carefully designed to be such a device and not your next fancy tech gizmo, and I absolutely love it for this. Hopping on a computer on the other hand does not yield a sense of relief, but rather stressed anticipation at the onslaught of mechanisms devised to get in the way of what I was trying to do. Of course, I can’t do as much on the reMarkable, but I’m curious more than ever to shift to it whatever I can.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
plots

This one is very abstract except when viewed from a good distance it comes together.

plots

I often contact artists to see if they’d like to do something public on the big plotter, and I’m often met with silence :). Sometimes though, I meet the rare characters who are completely fine doing something cool just because it’s cool, new, and takes their art in another dimension, oh and by the way there’s $0 to be made for either of us. I appreciate disinterested people, and Irish artist Patrick Boullier is such a person. He kindly provided a high resolution scan of his amazing piece: Runestone of Memory so I could try to turn that into penstrokes for the giant plotter. After several trials and help from Vectorizer.ai (top of the line for SVG tracing), I got somewhere we both felt was good, and so it ran on the big plotter for a week.

As is routine, the public reveal was preceded by several smaller scale trials.

This is an awesome piece on Norse mythology riddled with symbolism. I highly recommend reading the explanation of some of it (scroll down some).

aesthetics, plots

It was a great plot up until the massive cross-hatch of doom that was the black layer which took days and didn’t particularly enhance anything. Maybe it should start with black paper.

aesthetics, plots

I was introduced to the art form of Découpage. It’s simply one where cuts are made in paper or other mediums to represent a scene. A niche of this art form is the “Poya” representing alpine life, often depicting transhumance. I had this on my radar for a while as I figured it would make for some good plotting material and it does that to a decent extent.

The more interesting part however, is the artform’s unique property of always having material connected. Which means it’s perfect for laser cutting, and for playing with shadows.

In its rightful place

I unfortunately didn’t take good pictures of my trials, I attempted to fill the gaps in epoxy which was a disaster. There is definitely more to explore, and I will further delve into it in due time.

aesthetics, plots

This is the culmination of my collaboration with Lara Laubert. It turns out that Majestic Cat was only a preliminary test for this piece.

Each of Lara’s pen stroke was processed to be outlined and hatched so they would have enough visual weight on such a large scale. The basic “traveling salesman” algorithm I implemented doesn’t discriminate between outlines and hatches, so parts of the drawing look nonsensical until they all come together at the end.

I occasionally would stay near to machine to watch people’s reaction and had a few chats with them too. It’s a real pleasure to see how well received it was. When I took it down 3 students were curious about what I was going to do with the drawing so I offered it to them. It completely made their day and I couldn’t think of a better thing to happen for this drawing.

As always there were several trials and refinements before the public render.

aesthetics, plots

I forgot where I saw this done, but I was finally able to produce something close. The subject is only visible from a distance, getting close quickly dissolves it into something dizzying to look at.

aesthetics, plots

Mandala/Tessellations by Hava Edelstein (as always :)).

Large plastering of UV ink, it looks awesome in person.

I’ve refined my algorithms for processing multiple colors.

I’ve got my next 2 big plots lined up, but I’ll abstain from revealing their test renders until their full size reveal, likely this Fall. Both are collaborations with artists.

aesthetics, plots

I’ve gotten in touch with Lara Laubert through MandalaGaba when she reported a bug about it. Thank god for bugs, because she’s an extremely talented artist from Brazil, and has great enthusiasm for random cool projects. Inevitably when the big plotter was built, I reached out to see if she’d like to collaborate on getting her art rendered by it, and being the cool person that she is, she was willing to launch into it. I won’t link to her social media, because they’re all walled, I don’t have accounts, and I don’t want to refer to them but she is easily Googlable (something I soon won’t say either seeing as they have been taking steps away from their “don’t be evil” moto, but let’s not turn this into a state of the Internet discussion). Lara is an amazing artist greatly skilled in capturing the natural world. I would say there’s a gift in there too, but I don’t want to take away from the work she must have had to put in to develop her skills.

An so through much back and forth, Majestic Cat was born.

I don’t do much more than run some algorithms and operate the machine, but there’s still a lot of work involved. Including many trials before the public reveal: 6 days in a public place where her art to be drawn by the plotter. I did this to coincide with a public event and it was wonderful to see people’s reactions to it.

There was a slight misalignment about 2/3rd of the way in as was made evident at the return to origin. You wouldn’t really know it’s there unless you looked carefully. I believe someone must have bumped into it at some point and that’s ok, I know it’s a bit of a gamble with many people (and kids) stopping by to see it. Maybe it was an actual issue with the plotter, but I never saw this in thousands of hours of plotting.

I’ve been practicing with a laser, and so of course I lasered Majestic cat. It looks awesome.

From the many trials before the public installation, we have Majestic Cats all over the house now.

And the best part is, this is only our first checkpoint to make sure we could work with each other’s format requirements. Majestic cat is a fraction of something bigger.

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