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And Handwriting for All

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/

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Warming Up

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.