Eggbot software release notes

New features in v2.2.1

• Use of an engraving tool is now supported. When the option "Enable engraver, if attached" is checked in the "Options" tab of the Eggbot Control extension, then the engraver will be activated while plotting. Note that the engraver runs during the entire plot, even when the pen arm is lifted. The engraver is not switched off until the plot is finished. The "Manual" tab of the Eggbot Control extension also has commands to manually turn on and turn off the engraving attachment.

• The Hershey Text extension is now installed along with the other Eggbot software. Hershey Text is an Inkscape extension which renders a line of text in one of several stroke-based "engraving" fonts. This extension solves a persistent problem: How to easily create simple and readable text which the Eggbot can quickly draw. Unlike other Eggbot extensions for Inkscape, the Hershey Text extension is found under the Render category of extensions.

• An Inkscape extension for drawing name poems has been added to the EggBot Contributed extensions. See Name Poem for more information.

• An Inkscpae extension for spiralling long passages of text around an egg has been added to the EggBot Contributed extensions. See Spiral Wrapped Text for directions on using this new contributed extension.

Issues resolved in v2.2.1

• Support for engraving has been added. (Issue 31)

• Previously, the Eggbot did not support SVG files which used the min-x or min-y parameters of the SVG viewBox attribute (e.g., some Adobe Illustrator files). (Issue 36)

• The contributed Eggmazing extension has been changed to produce mazes which are drawn vertically from left to right. Previously, they were drawn horizontally from top to bottom and thus required more plotting precision for good cell wall alignment. (Issue 40)

• Some unrecognized SVG tags and objects would trigger "unable to draw" warnings while plotting. The Eggbot now ignores these tags while producing more informative warnings for unhandled objects such as images. (Issue 41 and Issue 42)

New features in v2.1.4

1. The Eggbot extensions menu in Inkscape has been reorganized. There are now two categories which appear under Inkscape's "Extension" menu: EggBot and EggBot Contributed. The core, supported Eggbot extensions remain under the EggBot category in the Extensions menu. Unsupported user-contributed extensions will appear under the EggBot Contributed category. In this release, the Eggmazing extension has been moved to that category as well as the addition of four new, unsupported extensions: Hatch fill, Post process trace bitmap, Stretch, and Twist. Although unsupported, documentation for these contributed extensions is available. Such is the power of wiki's and the communities they bring about!

2. The "Start with pen centered" option of the Eggbot Control extension has been made more intuitive. When enabled, it now means that the pen's position at the start of a plot is the center of your Inkscape drawing template (page). Namely, if the template's dimensions are W × H, then the pen is at the point (W/2, H/2). Here W and H are the template's width and height, respectively.

Issues resolved in v2.1.4 of the Inkscape Eggbot extensions

• If the pen-up or pen-down speeds are very slow or the pen-up or pen-down delays very long, then it was possible to get a timeout error while plotting. (Issue 21)

• An XML comment tag would cause a report of an object which must be converted to a path. While Inkscape itself does not generate XML comments, other applications might do so. These XML comments, when encountered during plotting, were generating spurious warnings, "Warning: unable to draw object, please convert it to a path first". (Issue 28)

• On Macs running OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the Eggbot Control and Eggmazing extensions would genrate error messages about "Invalid syntax". (Issue 29)

• Change "Start with pen centered" behavior to be more intuitive. See New features above. (Issue 30)

• Plotting of SVG "clones" did not work in all cases, particularly Inkscape's "cloned tiles". (Issue 32)

• Eggbot plotting ignored the SVG "viewbox" attribute. Drawings generated with Corel Draw, for instance, would draw as a few very tiny points. (Issue 33)

• When unzipping the Eggbot extension package on Linux, there was an extra directory level in the unzipped result. The Linux Eggbot extension package should not include the "eggbot_2010_10_04" parent directory. (Issue 34)

• After a plot was finished, the return-to-home function could needlessly rotate the egg multiple 360 degree turns. (Issue 35)