Experiments with Plotter Art

In my experience plotter art is a fantastic creative outlet for programmers/people with math backgrounds, especially if your day job doesn't produce anything physical in the real world. Shameless self-plug but I recently animated some old plotter pieces which was surprisingly easy since most of my plots were just piles of math that could be parameterized over time without too much hassle: https://chriskw.xyz/art/

Also big shout out to Michael Fogleman who's pieces inspired me to impulse buy an Axidraw at the beginning of quarantine: https://www.michaelfogleman.com/plotter/

I'd love to have a plotter.

(But for the pen lifting as another pointed out) the plotter seems to be being used as a modern day harmonograph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonograph).

The analog versions have been amusing us for over 100 years.

(One of the best father/son memories I have was a summer spent in Alaska visiting my father. While I waited for the salmon season to begin, so I could start work at the cannery, we had a kind of harmonograph build-off in his well-provisioned garage. I went for the standard design with the paper platen on a rocking pendulum—the pen driven perpendicular with a second pendulum. My dad threw money at his build to pick up some pricey-for-me, small, ball-and-socket joints intended for R/C car/boat drives. Not known for his creativity, he nonetheless came up wth a 4-pendulum design where two pendulums drove the platen and two others the pen. The results spoke for themselves: while my harmonograph designs always spiraled inevitably down to a point in the center of the design, my dad's might appear to be collapsing but then, as a pendulum pair began to move again in phase, the design would suddenly flower again as you watched it being traced out.)

Similar to the one I built: https://coimages.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/128/977/large_190...

A clever one that, while different than my dad's, likely gives similar results: http://pedrotucker.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/harmono...

(A "Boy Mechanic" book from the turn of the 20th Century depicts a harmonograph with I believe a double-pendulum: a pendulum hanging off a pendulum. That too would have added some interesting chaos without the expensive ball-and-socket joints needed.)

Silhouette-cutter/plotter by Google Gemini:

https://github.com/timonoko/Plotters/blob/main/gcodegen-from...

Github-repository is awful mess, but this might be of interest. It sends Gcode-command to EiBotBoard-plotter, which for some reason is popular among artistic types.

https://github.com/timonoko/Plotters/blob/main/plotgcode.py

> I have glued two small neodymium magnets to a 0.2mm fineliner pen

This sounds like an extremely simple way to attach a pen to a 3D printer. I'd love to see a picture of it.

I own an Ender 3 V2, which is a great little printer. I use it often and am considering a newer Ender because I want a larger print bed.

Anywayz, now I'm going to go see if I can easily throw some magnets on the head. Then I might attach those magnets to a pen or pencil.

I recently learned that vinyl cutters like Silhouette Portrait can be used for drawing too, which is fun as they can be picked up super cheap and they are very compact. I’m sure they’re not as good or accurate as a proper XY plotter but I’ve been having a lot of fun with mine! I’d recommend Silhouette as they are less closed than Cricut and there’s an Inkscape plugin

Fun TED talk about plotters: http://go.ted.com/joshuaschachter (me)

I always been intrigued with the drawings of Nake and also woth the ones by Knoll. It so happens that there is an used Ender printer on my way to this week. Thanks for the wonderful link!

I can't get over the fact that many plotter artists tried the NFT get rich quick scheme.

They killed the field forever.

Sorry but lifting pen is cheating.