u/iclubu

>Hey everyone! I’ve been working hard on Plotter-Studio, an open‑source generative art studio for pen plotters (Cameo 5).

My last post was for v3.2 — and I’m excited to share how much it’s grown.

What’s new in v5.5:

🧵 Needles (Oriented Dashes) — short dashes that follow image gradients. Great for structural, flowing textures.

🔗 Continuous Line (TSP) — single unbroken path, the pen never lifts. Uses a greedy nearest‑neighbour TSP approximation.

🌊 Perlin Noise Wobble — applies coherent noise displacement to any engine. Gives clean computer lines a hand‑drawn, organic feel.

🎨 CMYK Layer Export — splits any colour image into C, M, Y, K channels and exports 4 SVGs for multi‑pen colour plotting.

🗺️ Fast Marching (Topographic) — upgraded with manual seed placement, contour smoothing, and “Skip transparent” for PNGs with alpha.

🛠️ Full vpype pipeline — linemerge, linesort (with Two‑Opt), reloop, and linesimplify. All available as toggles.

🖊️ Pen Passes — duplicate dark paths up to 4 times for multi‑pass ballpoint ink density.

Stack: Python, Streamlit, FastAPI, scikit‑image, skfmm, Plotly, vpype.

GitHub: https://github.com/iclubu/Plotter-Studio

Just came across this awesome build on YouTube, a fully custom Delta Kinematics pen plotter with an auto tool changer, Bowden-driven Z-axis, and its own layer-based path generation software. The creator walks through the whole build, shows off multiple fill techniques (contour, lawnmower, AM fill), and demonstrates it with some really cool multi-layered drawings (snail, octopus, Fernand Léger piece). Sharing because it's inspiring seeing what's possible when you combine clever mechanics with custom software.

Youtube Video

I ran into something strange while plotting an SVG on my Cameo 5 and wanted to see if anyone here has experienced the same thing.

I converted a Ghost Rider image into an SVG, and the file itself is completely clean — no extra paths, no contour artifacts, nothing hidden when I inspect it in any editor. But when I sent it to the Cameo 5 to plot, the machine started drawing random lines that aren’t in the SVG at all. These lines only appear during the plotting process, almost like the machine is following some internal “return path” or movement line that shouldn’t be visible.

The weird part is that the SVG is perfect, but the plotter still adds these stray strokes. I’m attaching the plotted result so you can see the lines I’m talking about. Has anyone else had their plotter introduce lines that don’t exist in the file?

First print on the new app