Category: plotters

49 Articles
I.T., plotters, web development

I wrote something pretty neat for Plottybot, and for the longest time I thought I should make it available on its own, and detached from the project. Then the most excellent Stuff Made Here guy made a writing machine, and ran into all the issues I ran into which drove me to write my own algorithms for capturing and replaying handwriting. My stuff wasn’t online then and that’s a shame, it was only available by building a Plottybot, or at least using its Pi image. Oh well.

As is tradition, I captured my kids’ handwritings as I do every year some time in the Winter. But this time I made sure to have the new site ready before Thanksgiving so that people could use it as they went and met with loved ones.

So here, this site serves the purpose of capturing one’s handwriting. It supports cursive, character variations, saving, and finally exporting to SVG & GCode. Hopefully this means you can use it with your favorite craft machine for the coolest of personalized projects.

https://ben.akrin.com/plottytools/

I.T., plotters

I’ve recently gotten the ok to deploy a large gondola plotter in a public place. Theoretically, there is not limit to how large a gondola plotter can be. Practically, there are considerations to how large they get. I’ve been working on solving the various issues that arise from having a 10′ deployment. Of course with the ~20% margin to avoid extreme positions, it’s not 10’^2 drawable. Still though, there are many challenges due to the scale. Finding paper big enough is a challenge, so is moving it without damaging it. I figured out other quirks, it’s boring, let’s skip to the eye candy:

I have several public facing experiments lined up for it over the next few months or years. I’m not in a hurry. This is just a warm up to figure out what it means to deploy it in a public spot. What’s fairly clear though, is that there isn’t much I can do to make this better, and so this may be the culmination of a 5 years development effort.

That’s 3 days of the machine working non-stop, I’m watching the ink level closely and hope it’ll be done in a couple more days.

Lego / Duplo, plots, plotters

Robin built a very cool Lego Mindstorms based plotter. I’ve seen him run into issues similar to what I ran into, and solve them. I’ll sometimes attach a monetary prize to some of his Mindstorms projects. Once he’s scratched the itch and wants to move on, but I know a lot of challenges occur not just making a robot work, but making it work well.

For a while there was $5 on making a drawing machine that drew something beyond a basic shape, it didn’t have to be much, just had to be something that proved the machine’s worth. And he’s earned it with this:

He didn’t write the software that turns text into lines, but there were plenty of mechanical challenges to getting the machine consistent enough to make this. Overall I’m blown away by the quality of today’s Mindstorms. Seeing him build his machine reminded me I had this set growing up:

Might have planted some seeds.

In the meantime I’m testing a 10′ deployment, a drawing machine so big one needs a ladder to get to the top. I haven’t ran it yet, but I know there will be new issues arising from the scale. Even just setting the paper is challenging.

plotters

I’m revisiting and polishing the “ink refill routine” capability, and I rewrote the ligature algorithm for cursive handwriting. This is mostly just a test but it shows promise.

I.T., plotters

Before there was PlottyBot, I had designed and built a Gondola Plotter.

The software stack was meant for teaching, the parts meant to be cheap. It served that purpose and then I got engrossed in the tabletop plotter that became PlottyBot. In the back of my mind, I knew I’d circle back to the gondola plotter and bake in it all the lessons I learned, and port the PlottyBot software stack to it. Well, it’s now done, and I have great plans for it. For now I deployed it on a small wall for stress testing it and making sure it’s ready for prime time. I parameterized the PlottyBot software stack so that it can either run the tabletop or the gondola plotter. Live remote drawing, super complex plots, handwriting, it’s all there.

Through the iterations, I’ve managed to make it very accurate for a gondola plotter. One thing I make a point to do in the design, is open up the pen end so as to be able to watch the sweet drawing action.

And since I’m catching up on plotter related matters, I guest speaker’d in Robin’s classroom to talk about X,Y coordinates. It was super fun and of course, the end goal was to get kids to drive the plotter. Most kids were curious in seeing the machine draw, few were enthralled. I loved having the chance to trigger some sparks in their brains. We did some other fun things around Cartesian coordinate systems.

I’ve been asked to do it again this year. I’d love to, and I’ll have one more plotter in my arsenal.

I.T., plots, plotters, web development

I built a website for running experiments in collaborative drawing. It’s pretty neat and I’m not going to describe it just yet, but in the process of testing it, I threw at it all kinds of plots I had at the tip of my fingers, and it yielded some pretty cool results.

I may have here my next plotting streak: microplots. Some look predictably bad as they were meant as stress tests, but some came out well enough to make me curious.

More to come on all this soon…

I.T., plotters

The Christmas Card video was meant as a bit of a gimmick, something to post about. And it definitely worked to this effect. PlottyBot had some visibility on Reddit and ended up on HackADay :).

It’s always fun to get a bit of spotlight and see people react positively to something you built. Then Robin needed to actually write a bunch of valentines cards to his classmates, and he didn’t want to do it at all. So I proposed the plotter and his captured handwriting to make it fun. He didn’t hesitate and I learned a couple of things. First, he was fully capable of operating it, a sign that he’s growing up and that the software stack does make plotting accessible. Second, it was actually less work to “mass produce” handwritten cards. I thought it’d be the same amount of work as compared to writing them yourself, but really he’d just show up to change the paper when the plotter was done. He was watching TV while the plotter was working for him… Maybe this whole project is a failure.

aesthetics, plots, plotters

This is close to the upper limit for plot complexity. The squiggles are packed so tight the ink and the fine point pen laying it are at the limit of what they can do while keeping the strokes distinct.

for reference this is an elaboration on: 26,237 Pen Strokes

Having lived alongside machines my whole life, I never fully understood until this project what they were capable of. I knew it, but I didn’t understand it fully. I could I never draw this well, I wouldn’t have the dexterity to make these strokes, I wouldn’t have the ability to draw as fast, as relentlessly, or as flawlessly. Lastly, for the 17 hours that the plotter was drawing away, I was free to do other things. I know it’s not much of an epiphany but I found myself starring at this ongoing plot quite a bit pondering about how overwhelmingly better this machine was at drawing than I could ever hope to be. It’s one thing when a machine does something completely foreign that just isn’t possible for us humans, it’s another much more relatable thing when it holds a pen and draws. Learning about stepper motors has been a small revolution in my mind, and I see them everywhere in the world now.

I think I’ve pushed this one machine as far as it can go while still producing something of value. It’s a really good feeling to have pushed it this far given it represents the culmination of a 3 year pursuit. Now I can focus even more on the funner aspects of plotting cool things, knowing the machine and software stack can tackle the maximum level of complexity I would throw at them.

Reference: Ivan Murit’s Texturing

aesthetics, plots, plotters

Little by little I’m increasing the complexity of what I can send to the plotter. As an image passes through the various programs I choose for a particular render, I push their limits and often run into bugs, memory limits and others. As much as possible, I dockerize each step so they are easier to summon and improve on their own. This also allows for pipelining.

I finally found a fast and reliable SVG->GCode converter. Inkscape’s is reliable but it’s extremely slow. I had to rewrite a part of it to be iterative rather than recursive so it could handle the size of the SVGs I am throwing at it.

Inkscape itself has a command line mode so some of the repetitive stuff I use it for are dockerized, for example to ungroup objects and break apart compound paths. It’s truly amazing.

I kind of want to publish all this but I have no idea if I violated any licenses frankensteining code from various sources. And I have much better things to do with my time than to find out. Things such as this wonderful plot:

I.T., plotters

I’ve heard from several people building their own PlottyBot but it’s the first time I see a picture of one :). It truly is a great honor.

Built by Jeff.

I.T., plotters

One of my obsessions in developing PlottyBot has been handwriting. Even with Mandalagaba I care very much that the penstrokes originate from one’s hand and avoid tools which “do the drawing for you”. This is where your personality transpires on paper beyond your ability to draw. I thought it’d be neat to have a pen plotter able to write in one’s handwriting.

This idea came up a long time ago, and I researched many ways to achieve it. The unfortunate but predictable conclusion was that I would need to write my own font format to get there.

Introducing Flexible Font. PlottyBot comes with the ability to capture your handwriting. The Flexible Font format is monoline based, holds metadata on your pen strokes to define where ligatures may occur, it also allows for character variations. It’s tailored just for plotters :).

The video bellow shows several ways to use PlottyBot with handwriting. The first is a simple live replay of pen strokes from https://plottybot.mandalagaba.com, the next ones use Flexible Font.

 

I.T., plotters

Covid and 3D printer mishaps have seriously hindered my ability to iterate on the plotter design which I was hoping would be behind me last March :\. Oh well, I’m getting close to finally being able to release it into the world.

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