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 wonder if anyone's made an efficient converter that changes G-Code to pen plotter-oriented HP-GL yet.

my last attempt using my 7550A resulted in my "fastest plotter ever made" being absolutely dog slow because it had to skip all around the page to deal with innumerable unsorted line segments, with no use made of the built-in chorded curve drawing commands or anything else of that nature

...I wonder how hard it'd be to replace the thing's drive electronics with something with more horsepower than a 68000, and whether the encoder hardware is up to continuous servocontrol for actual curves instead of decomposing them into straight lines


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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

So now I'm remembering seeing a talk by Theodore Gray about getting a giant embroidery machine to do super-complex things it wasn't really meant to do, and since he's from Wolfram he used Mathematica to do A Bunch Of Math Stuff to optimize the path to get through the patterns. It's the kind of thing that sounds simple when some expert is saying "so we used a numerical approximation of Whatzisname's theorem" and so on.

vpype possibly? Maybe adding inkscape for flavor...

Someone has written an svg to gcode plug-in, which doesn't seem to go in reverse, but vpype's optimization overall is really wonderful -- so if you can go from g-code to dxf and dxf to svg (maybe inkscape) should then be able to export optimized whatever the name is for what old HP plotters speak from vpype.

I'm TA-ing a Drawing with Machines course which works with some truly ancient plotters if you want the github syllabus for curiosity reasons

Scuttlebutt is javascript has a library for viewing gcode, which means you could write a little script to view and then open it...
Or I've also been told you can open it in Cura, export it as an obj or stl, then open it in Meshmixer, then from mesh mixer export an SVG

Either of those gets you into vpype and from there it should be easy to optimize and then convert.