atomicthumbs

remote sensing practicioner

gregarious canid. avatar by ISANANIKA.


Website League address
@wolf@forest.stream
send me an email
atomicthumbs@wolf.observer
twitter but hopefully i only post photos there in the future
twitter.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter!! this one will let me tell you where i go
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter rss same thing
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs/rss
Website League (centralized federation social media project)
websiteleague.org/
Push Processing (Website League photography instance)
pushprocess.ing/
88x31 button embed code
<a href="https://wolf.observer/88x31"><img src="https://wolf.observer/images/wolf-88x31.png" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a>
forest.stream (general admission website league instance)
forest.stream/
bluesky (probably just for photos)
bsky.app/profile/wolf.observer
this will be a cohost museum someday
cohost.rip/

I still have my HP 7550A. The Fastest Pen Plotter Ever Made. Six-G acceleration. eight pen carousel. can support arbitrary pens with 3D printed adapters and the cover off. and I still want to make (and sell) beautiful prints with it.

unfortunately I have bounced off this before, as the thing only handles HP/GL (and not HP/GL-2), which places some serious restrictions on the sort of input it's able to accept. The built-in arc drawing routines etc are primitive and accept a chord angle, so whatever's assembling its input might as well not bother, and just generate curves from its own line segments.

The one time I tried getting vector art into the plotter, it worked, but it generated the line segments out of order and so jumped all over the page, making it take many times what it should have to plot.

Since then, there's been advances in the state of the art of plotter utility software: vpype, for example. I haven't had the chance to try it out yet. It looks like it might vastly simplify the issue of getting good HP/GL out of other things that generate g-code/SVGs/etc.

A possibly bigger problem I encountered was that every avenue that would make it easier for me to get into generative art seems kinda closed off: they all seemed designed to allow programmers to easily and quickly make art, instead of for allowing artists to easily and quickly make programs. All sorts of javascript node type things, maintained by people with opensea links in their twitter bios. I am a visual thinker first and foremost, have extreme trouble translating my ideas into code in any situation, and this approach just doesn't work well for me.

has anyone else done research into this that's borne fruit


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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

Hey my partner and I have actually had endless fun headaches dealing with HP/GL and pretty much fucking nothing outputs it correctly, owing to those fucking arcs.

However, in our case it was able to draw smooth arcs if you put the arc code in manually, it was just that exactly zero extant tools did this- every single g-code -> HP/GL translator breaks arcs into line segments, which when coupled with automatic tool offset means your plotter is doing three moves per planck length.

Luckily HP/GL is remarkably readable if you're familiar with the vanilla tellex g-code of yore. It would make a fun project to write a transpiler that actually works- if your plotter natively supports some form of arc command, ours does, not all do, idk.

https://codelv.com/projects/inkcut/ this one here's the standalone version. Lets shoot the shit about it sometime tho, I love plotters.

mine does support an arc command, but all it does is have the 68000 running the plotter break down the arc into a number of line segments specified by the chord angle parameter. i'm not sure if there's any advantage over doing it computerside

oh yeah i've gotten deep into making my own plotter over the last few months, but for using it in an intalgio printing process, its been strange and rewarding.
vpype does have support (but i cant tell you how good it is, and i wish there was a non CLI tool besides some inkscape plugins that barely work) and theres a good discord w a fair few vintage plotter people there who can maybe help w technical stuff.

i've found the plotter art community exactly like youve said though, yeah. so much of it seems based on making a weird svg using processing or some inkscape process, then plotting it. it's very odd to me that there's not a lot else going on in the space. i share my silly little images and it feels like im playing to the wrong crowd. idk.