Corey Haber just posted a clip of his AxiDraw finishing its first painting:
Finished my first plotter painting using a custom 3D printed plotter paintbrush. 15 layers of color and 57,000 dots using @Liquitex acrylic paint. #plottertwitter #axidraw @EMSL #processing #creativecoding #generative pic.twitter.com/FqUnfahErH
— Cory Haber (@Cory_Haber) September 9, 2019
Michael Fogleman is an active member of the plotter art community. His twitter feed often contains either new art, or links to new tools that he has made.
He has created and shared some incredible resources, including a wide variety of vector art tools and even an alternate Python library for AxiDraw.
I am a fan of science as an art subject, and Michael’s protein ribbon diagram drawings are a great example. A ribbon diagram depicts the 3D structure of the protein as well as the common secondary structures of helixes, strands, and coils.
In addition to making the drawings, he has a twitter bot that publishes ribbon diagrams and has published the code for the project. This ribbon diagram was one that we got to see at the Plotter People meetup in San Francisco.
Michael hits another of my weaknesses, vintage gaming with his NES Sparklines drawings.
For these drawings, I use an NES emulator (of my own creation) to record a snapshot of the Nintendo’s RAM at each frame (60 fps). The NES only had 2048 bytes of RAM. For each address in memory, I plot its values over time as an individual sparkline. I only show addresses that changed at least once, so there are usually fewer than 2048 sparklines. Because each game developer used the memory in different ways, each game produces its own unique look when plotted.
He also plotted something dear to our hearts (and close to the heart of the NES), the MOS 6502 processor.
One subject that I’ve often thought appropriate for plotting are maps, and Michael’s topographic maps are elegant. Again, in addition to making drawings, he has provided his code for working with AWS terrain data as well.
Michael sells drawings, and accepts commissions for favorite NES games, proteins, map regions, and even cellular automata. He has projects on wide ranging subjects, not limited to pen plotters, so go check them out!
Vincent Pidone is an artist particularly interested in Moire patterns, making the AxiDraw a tool well suited to him. You can find him on instagram, and he has a show opening this week.
I have a show of my recent artwork opening August 17th in Hudson, New York. The show will be up through October. All of the work consists of Moire drawings, some hand drawn, but most of them were done with my Axidraw. (Everything in the photo above was done with Axidraw.)
I am always intrigued to see artists building on each other’s work. In the piece above, Vincent took artwork from Justin Lincoln and added colors and layers with the AxiDraw to make it into something new. Here’s Justin’s original:
Vincent has also experimented with using his AxiDraw for dispensing paint.
He has shared the software and hardware details of the project on hackaday.io.
Vincent’s show, focusing on his recent Moire pieces, is opening this Saturday, August 17th at Walnut Hill Fine Art in Hudson, New York, and will be up through October. Even if you aren’t able to make it to his show, you can follow him on instagram.
Technical support can be a challenge, and often a successful outcome is one where you don’t hear back because everything is working. Sometimes, though, you get an extra special confirmation that you’ve fixed the issue. Thank you to Nick Z. for sending this AxiDraw plot in after we resolved a hardware problem!
One of the features in our new Hershey Text v 3.0 software is the ability to extend it with new fonts.
One company, Quantum Enterprises, is already selling high quality stroke fonts that are compatible with the new Hershey Text, and ideal for use with the AxiDraw.
Their fonts are available in matched pairs: A TrueType (outline) font and a single-stroke SVG stroke font. The TrueType font works as a regular computer font, which you can use to lay out and edit text on your page. Hershey Text then performs automatic font substitution replacing the text in place with the matching stroke font.
Here is a sample of what one of their regular (TrueType) handwriting-like fonts looks like, as laid out on the page within Inkscape:
And, here is how that same text looks once rendered with Hershey Text into its single-stroke SVG font version:
The single-stroke text comprises a set of paths ideally suited to be traced with a pen. And finally, here is how that stroke text looks as plotted with the AxiDraw:
These new stroke font pairs, as well as custom fonts, are available to purchase directly from Quantum Enterprises.
An especially neat feature of these fonts is that they can work with the Quantum Enterprises Scriptalizer character substitution software — now available directly integrated within a special version the AxiDraw software. This software performs automatic substitution between different letter forms (glyphs) for the same character, making plotted text look more like handwriting.
Following the release of our new AxiDraw software this week, we are pleased to announce the release of two additional software components that greatly extend the capability of the machine.
The AxiDraw software is now available in two alternate versions that may be helpful for developers or for anyone who would like to control the machine programmatically rather than through Inkscape: A stand-alone command-line interface (CLI) tool, as well as a full-featured Python library.
The first new tool is the AxiDraw CLI, a command-line API to drive the AxiDraw outside of Inkscape. Like the Inkscape-based software, its primary function is to plot SVG files. However, it is a stand-alone utility that can be driven from within shell scripts and other environments that make use of shell commands.
Once installed, plotting a file can be as simple as executing the following command:
axicli filename.svgThere are, of course, a breadth of different modes and configuration parameters available. We have written detailed descriptions of each of these options in our comprehensive API documentation. The CLI also supports the use of configuration files to quickly switch between different sets of parameters.
Since most common scripting and programming environments allow one to call shell commands like this, that allows the AxiDraw to be used directly within a wide variety of frameworks.
The second new tool is the AxiDraw Python API. The AxiDraw CLI is written within Python, and we have both exposed and expanded upon that nucleus to create a flexible and powerful Python module, complete with its own comprehensive documentation.
Just like the CLI, the Python API can plot SVG documents; it can both read SVG files and accept strings containing SVG data.
It also has features that are not available within Inkscape or the CLI: It supports direct interactive XY control. You can use absolute or relative moveto/lineto type commands to control the AxiDraw from within your own programs. This is particularly useful for a wide variety of potential AxiDraw applications that are not writing or drawing, but otherwise making use of the AxiDraw as a low-cost motion control platform.
Some years ago we wrote a neat little Inkscape extension called Hershey Text. Hershey text could take a little bit of text that you would type and render it into stroke fonts, also known as engraving fonts.
We are very pleased this week to release an all-new version of Hershey Text, written from scratch, and far more useful, capable, and extensible. We have a comprehensive user guide for it as well.
Hershey Text v 3.0 will be bundled into future versions of Inkscape, but it’s also included with the new AxiDraw software and available on its own for download today.
We’re pleased to announce the release of the latest version of the AxiDraw software, 2.5. which includes a number of frequently-requested features that we’ve been working on over the last year.
Perhaps foremost, we have updated and greatly expanded the PDF AxiDraw user guide, which covers how to use the AxiDraw, including every part of the software. In addition to sections that go over the new features, we have thoroughly revised the rest, including a larger and clearer section on getting started.
In normal use, the AxiDraw software plots elements in the same order that they occur in the file. However, depending on how your file was generated, that may not be the most efficient way to do things. If the order of the elements in the file is poor enough, the plot time can actually be dominated not by writing and drawing time, but by pen-up movements (illustrated here in red) between objects.
We’ve written a new SVG ordering utility, that can sorting of objects in an SVG document, re-ordering them as needed to reduce pen-up travel. It’s also a layer-aware and group-aware sorting tool, that can process a full document and reorder elements on each layer of the document and either respect or break apart other groups in your document. This tool is available in two versions: An individual Inkscape extension as well as an integrated version that you can use automatically within the AxiDraw software.
The new AxiDraw software supports assigning names to individual AxiDraw units over USB, which you can use as semi-permanent labels when printing to a particular machine. You can also now plot to a specific AxiDraw, or simultaneously plot the same document to a number of connected machines.
This release includes an all-new version of Hershey Text, our software for creating stroke-based text within Inkscape. You can about the new features in our blog post announcing it.
Amongst other improvements in the new software are the following:
We recommend this new version to all AxiDraw users; you can download it for Mac, Windows, or Linux, following our guide here.
The folks at Sac City Brews use an AxiDraw to create their tap list. The AxiDraw plots out the beer name, info and logo onto a piece of acrylic which gets mounted in the tap list above the bar.
Best of all, they’ve mounted the AxiDraw in plain view, so patrons can see it getting ready for the next beer to go on tap. (You can see video of it in action in their Yelp pictures.)
If you’re in Sacramento and are looking to try out a new tap house, check them out. Thank you to Todd for sending us the pictures!
