Pen Plotter Programming: The Basics (2017)
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I also collaborated with my coworkers during work-sponsored hackathons on some other fun plotting machines. One that could draw on a huge whiteboard with multiple colors and another whose mechanism was based on the Shaper Origin:
https://twitter.com/FogleBird/status/1549798581409824778
https://twitter.com/FogleBird/status/1018296014585978880
Bonus, my favorite tool-path optimization to draw adjacent circles:
- https://twitter.com/Licia_He
- https://www.instagram.com/blahblahpaperblah/
- https://www.eyesofpanda.com/
She has 20+ Q&A about how she does it: https://www.eyesofpanda.com/project/plotter_painting_q_a/ and she intends to open source her code someday too I think
What surprised me is how good some plots look and how “cheap” others come out. I’ve made a few that were fun to watch but the output isn’t nicer than a laser printer.
My current thinking is the more “exotic” the pen and paper is, the better.
Oh? What makes for 'exotic' materials - like the weight of the paper, cold-vs-hot pressed, and so on?
The Uni-Ball Signo metallic gel pens have performed pretty well, but can drip on the corner when the piece is done and the arm returns to origin, so you'll want to pay attention to it:
Looks like its unavailable for me right now, but there are others you can try.
For white paper, this has worked very well for me: https://a.co/d/9qoDwML
Readers may also appreciate my post “Pen Plotter Art & Algorithms” here:
Also the ender series of 3d printers can make use of a pen attachment as well, but those are 8x8 inches. There are larger 3d printers, and the software or whatever to plot with the ender 3 was open source enough. My ender3 was <$200
generally, though, i do enjoy taking advantage of scaled-up (cheap) commercial products. but i also value supporting an open, small business (EMSL, and now Bantam Tools) that is active in the communities using its products.
You're really paying for the dedicated use-case design (the pen carriage precision on the Axidraw is excellent) and the active software support both from the company and the community.
why is this a "but"? does the existence of HPGL negate the work being presented here somehow? modern plotters seem to have less capable control languages such as whatever the axidraw does, or G-code for most of the open source controllers. I guess folks assume you'll just be programmatically generating or converting to the output format anyways.
inkscape can output HPGL directly. there's also chiplotle which is a python library. i've tried to gather up all the other HPGL-related software i could find here: https://github.com/beardicus/awesome-plotters#hpgl
Also, links to 'Makeblock XY Plotter' seem to no longer work as it has been discontinued? (Don't recommend going to their site - it has an obnoxious number of 'sign up' popups, sadly)
He says "I'm no biologist", which is of course no issue - anyone should make whatever images they want, but I wonder if the pose and detail that he includes are what looks good to him, rather than what is 'most' relevant.
Either way, they do look good like this :)
https://github.com/fogleman/ribbon/blob/master/ribbon/camera...
it's getting the carbonyls (C and O atoms) and then trying to pick a view vector based on maximising some scores ... of some kind. Like the aspect ratio and number of visible points? Not sure.
Curious to hear how a "protein structure expert" would prefer to pose the proteins?
I did sell some of these drawings. Two customers stand out in my memory. One wanted drawings as a gift to his father who had spent most of his career working with some specific protein. The other was someone who had a genetic defect in the family and wanted a drawing of the protein responsible for it.
For example, it's quite nice that the haemoglobin one is down the central axis of the tetramer, and shows all the haem groups. I would expect almost any image that wanted to show the most parts of that structure to use a similar pose.
I had not realised when I asked the question that the poses were picked in code, which is similar to how PDBsum does it (pretty sure Roman Laskowski told me it did, but I would have to check). Something like maximising the number of atoms in the plane of the screen.
Of course, when it comes to YFP (your favourite protein), individual researchers are likely going to focus on different parts. My interest was always in the topology, so I would want to see all the helices and sheets, but someone else might want to see the active site front and center.
Incidentally, I've heard the term 'molecular porn' used for fancy/shiny looking diagrams - not sure if it applies to these as well :)
It converts a 3D STL file to SVG with "hidden wireframe removal".
There is also an "anaglyph" mode to output red/blue lines to be seen in 3D with red/blue glasses.
The online converter: https://plotter.vision/
More info from Trammell Hudson, the author: https://trmm.net/Plotter-Vision/
Also because I also have laser plotter and 3D-printer running on G-code.
Google could not find any G-code interpreter, which is also slightly weird?
Pen Plotter Programming: The Basics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16191811 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)