I fully converted a Bambu A1 Mini (old firmware) to a highly accurate plotter printer. Ive since tuned it manually with a custom test pattern and patience...70 versions later lol
Question for the community, are plotter printers that can draw with a .4mm ultra fine tip pen unique?
I'll follow up below with some peices of work ive created and even share whatever i can with the process 😃
Watercolor
Liner Brush – N° 02
Fineliner 0.5 mm
Watercolor Paper 210 × 297 mm
Built a machine about three weeks ago, still experimenting. Used DrawingBot to process an AI image.
Took some old Truchet patterns and remixed them.
5 years ago, I started the project Dot-Bot with u/s3lect. It is a large scale wall plotter project that draws with actual spray cans. Last weekend, we showed it off for the very first time outside and in front of a live crowd at the annual maker fair in Hannover Germany. Here is one of the murals we spray painted over the course of the event. Fortunately, the Dot-Bot proved to be extremely resilient. During the 3 days it was installed on the wall, it got torched by the sun and soaked from the rain multiple times. However, it never let us down. We definitely had a blast talking to a ton of fellow makers and interested visitors!
I had been doing some hand drawn bubble fields and converting them to vector/plotting them for years. There was obviously something to the process of individually drawing each circle over weeks or months that make them a very different kind of piece.
I had been resistant to doing these in code, but I recently decided to explore that tension and try using Claude for doing generative approaches. At its core it’s pretty basic circle packing but I’m able to get a lot of variation on each one.
Still adding a lot of features to try and get some ordered chaos going on and these are some first results.
Pen is a Muji 0.38
More of an experiment than anything. I regret my color choices but that’s nothing new.
Just messing around with a Cricut. Plotter Art looks so satisfying.
Apparatus for transmitting electrical energy.
Nikola Tesla
Patent US1119732A
Generative overlay on the skull + custom typography pattern for the snail. This one took some time. Might try again with orange instead of blue.
Video + explainer: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcJwg3zyklW/
Hi all, long time no post!
Here are a few of my last designs, coded this summer in the country side, and plotted right back home. I added a couple of crosses to my tiles and am really happy with the outputs. Here are only two examples (the more quiet ones), but I'll post more drawings of this algorithm soon hopefully.
Sukura gelpen on Stonehenge black heavy.
Found out the hard way that gel pens tend to get smudgy when lines overlap. Still happy with the outcome
Shinjuku, Japan! Plotted with some "idea" brand fineliners I got from poundland, on white 300gsm card. It looks very yellow because it's evening and under house lighting. Turned out quite nice I think!
This piece starts from a custom 1D, 2-state cellular automaton, then uses the resulting state grid once vertically, in red, and again horizontally, in blue. By interpreting adjacent same-state cells as contiguous regions, I can use their boundaries to inform the amplitude of the plotted lines. I’ve explored similar techniques before as a way of creating shading with a single pen width, but in this work I like how it blurs the underlying CA states.
I bought the iDraw HSE A3 a few days ago. But I can’t even manage to draw smooth circles. Also, there’s a slight cracking sound coming from the rear axle (you can hear it in the video). Please help me :(
I’m using Inkscape with the following settings
Basic Setup
Pen height UP %: 60
Pen height DOWN %: 30
Movement Speeds
Writing/Drawing speed %: 35
Pen-up movement speed %: 60
Acceleration: Standard
Use constant speed when pen is down: off
Pen Timing
Pen raising speed: Maximum
Pen lowering speed: Standard
Delay: 0
Advanced:
Plot optimization: Least; Only connect adjoining paths
Motor Resolution: ~2870 DPI (Slightly smoother)
This is AxiDraw Control version 3.9.5.
Your AxiDraw Control software is up to date.
Your AxiDraw has firmware version 3.0.2.
Your firmware is up to date; no updates are available.
Additional system information:
3.11.6 (main, Oct. 3, 2023, 09:16:16) [GCC UCRT 13.2.0 64-bit (AMD64)]
Voltage readout: 821 (~24.67 V).
Current setpoint: 371 (~0.68 A