So this is the real star of v1.2: The norwegian pixel.

1. Save your source image as a greyscale PBM or PGM file, and put it on the SD card. Note that GIMP saves PBM files as 2 colour dithered files, so you need to export as PGM to get it to work there.  Photoshop just saves in whatever format the image happens to be in, so make sure you convert to grayscale (not RGB or indexed) before saving.
2. Put the SD card in the PolargraphSD and turn it on.
3. Open the controller and drag a selection box where you want to draw your picture.  For one reason or another, you do need to have an image loaded before you’re allowed to drag a selection area.  I just noticed that.  But the image you load is nothing to do with what you’re drawing.
4. On the roving tab, click set roving area.  This tells the machine where you want it to start.
5. Click draw norwegian… and enter the filename of your image file.
   Click trace outline and the machine will quickly draw an outline of where the image will be.  The image will be scaled so that it is the width of the rove area, regardless of how tall that works as being.  So really the height of the rove area is irrelevant.
6. Choose the amplitude (row width) and the wavelength, and hit submit to send the command off to the machine.
7. Wait many hours.

I haven’t done an awful lot of testing of this, but the initial results are beautiful.  

HOWEVER, I have noticed one issue – there are regularly spaced breaks in each row, some more obvious than others.  This is because of the way the beaded cord slips on the sprockets, and it’s a problem I actually expected to see before now.  The issue is that the beaded cord is not manufactured to very close tolerances, so the sprockets are rarely a perfect size.  It means that each beads-worth of rotation, there’s a little slip while the beads pull taut into the teeth.

There isn’t really a solution as far as I can see, as long as there’s even a mismatch between the circumference of the sprocket and the length of a piece of cord with the same number of beads, there’ll always be a little period where it falls forward.

Note that I think it’s only a problem for machines with beaded cords – if you use reels of thread and smooth bobbins, you’ll be fine.

–EDIT I goofed a bit with the various firmwares, and half the stuff didn’t work. I’m a bit puzzled how I didn’t notice, but there you go. Anyway, I’ve fixed a bunch of stuff, so if you had problems with the newest stuff, give it another shot.

Two exciting new features for PolargraphSD.  Both of them rely on the new roving area facility.   This is essentially nothing more than a way of specifying a drawing “live” area, and telling the machine.  Previously the machine has had very little concept of state, and (more-or-less) just did what it’s told.  Now, by setting a rove area, we can tell it to limit its behaviour to just that area.

Both of these features are very GOOD ones.

How to rove.

Most of the roving functions are hidden away on the roving tab, but it shares buttons with input.  Define a area on-screen by dragging a selection area, or selecting the frame.  Now just press send roving area and a new command is sent off that sets this in the machine’s live memory.  This area is volatile, so if you reset, you’ll need to resend.

Vector sprites.

A vector sprite is nothing more than a small vector design, but instead of existing in the coordinates system of the machine, it has its own coordinates system.  So when I have made up a font with each letter being one sprite, each letter has 0,0 at the bottom-left point.  Capital letters are 1.0 high, and around 0.4 wide.  What unit these values are measurements of is irrelevant, because the machine can now scale them to any size, and  draw them anywhere, and rotate them to the four cardinal native polargraph directions.

Vector sprites will be able to be lots of things in the future, but the first application is writing text.

1. Choose your rove area by selecting an area and clicking send roving area.
2. Choose whereabouts in the rove area you want the text to start by clicking start text at point and clicking somewhere in your rove area.  The gondola will move to that point on the machine and wait.
3. Click render writing to bring up the writing dialog:
   Type in your text or load it from a text file using the button. For now, it can only draw in a south-east direction.
4. Notice that there’s a file prefix here.  This tells the machine to find the sprite font files on the SD card in a subdirectory called sprite, and that the files themselves will be prefixed with let (for letter).
5. Hit generate commands and see that each character has been converted to a new command:
   The C39 commands tells the machine to draw a sprite from a file on the SD card, at the current machine position, and scaled 80x.

In this case, these are letter form files, and there’s loads of them which is why they get their own directory on the card.  And because this is being done in the context of writing, then the machine knows that if it finds itself outside the rove are, then it knows how to work out where to start the new line.

The grid size sets the text row height, and the pixel scaling controls how big the actual letter forms are scaled within those rows.

In practice, this has the ring of Jack Torrance to it, which is nervously apt.  It’s possible to read fragments, but because each line is longer than the last, and because of the curve and the distortion, it’s almost impossible to figure out how the lines follow on from one another, and very easy to lose track.  Quite disorientating to try.

For this to work you need to copy the sprites folder onto your SD card.

Get the new code, controller and things from the repo

Polargraph 1.2 Controller source code

Polargraph server for polarshield source code

Or in the binaries bundle.  I put the mac and the pc version in together – let me know if there’s any problems with doing it this way.

The other new feature is actually more significant, but a bit more simple:

Norwegian pixel FTW.  I’ll write some more about that tomorrow, because it’s bedtime now.

Didn’t get around to making up a numbered release this weekend, entirely restructured the server code instead to separate the basic polargraph stuff from the advanced polargraphSD stuff.  This will make it much easier to keep multiple versions in sync, but needs a bit more testing to make sure I haven’t broken something in the mean time.

However, also added a couple of new features, one of which is the much-asked for norwegian pixel style (above).  This is named after the Norwegian Creations drawbot that I featured on this blog before, and looks quite like it, but is remarkable because it draws directly from a bitmap file on the SD card itself, rather than interpreting commands from the controller.

A major new feature sprang up over the weekend, and it’s actually one of the things that was immediately desirable when this project started over a year ago. 

PolargraphSD can now draw vector sprites.  These are little fragments of vector art saved into their own files, they are executed by a new command (C39) that specifies where on the machine they should be drawn and at what size.  It works as a kind of macro.  The first application is writing:

In this case I’ve made up 26 files, each with a letter form in it.  I specify the active area using the controller and a starting point where to draw the first letter, then feed in a load of text.  Lines wrap until the active area is full.

This uses the rove area as the demarcation for it’s operations.  The rove area is not entirely a new thing, but it’s never really worked before.  It’s really nothing more than a safe, cartesian area to behave in and it’s specified as simply as dragging a box in the controller and sending it to the machine. It’s going to be important for future standalone functions where the machine will be given free rein to draw or scribble or otherwise fill in this rove area.  It’s called a rove area because the machine is free to rove anywhere in it.

I’ve committed the code I’ve done already, but there’s still a little bit of work to do before putting out a full new compiled version, so that’ll happen later in the week.