Most people think that Jurg Lehni’s Hektor was the original hanging-v drawbot.  I know I owe my excitement about drawing machines to seeing that video ten years ago, but I also remember being pretty frustrated at the time that there was no instructions on how it was done, no software, no hardware.  That’s always been the bit that interested me.

Though the mechanical setup of the hanging plotter machine seemed obvious enough to me that I was sure that it must have been done before Hektor, I never saw any evidence of it until this video:

That shows a hanging-v plotter in action, at the SIGGRAPH show in 1988 made out of Technic Lego, drawing more-or-less the same test patterns I was working with this time last year.  This confirms Hektor as only the most famous (and messiest) example in a long line of revisions stretching back at least 25 years.  It’s good to kill your gods every now and then.

I am excited to see so much interest in the last year or two in drawing machines, and am pretty thrilled to be involved in that surge of interest – I am vain enough to like to think I have done something to help it along, and I have met lots of great new people along the way – thank you for being interested enough to harass me into doing it better!

Happy holidays to you all!

Well, it was going to happen sooner or later – I didn’t check the PCB design properly before sending it off to have it made, so the SD card doesn’t work on any of the batch of PCBs I’ve just received.  OOPS.

Fortunately, the repair isn’t too much of a problem.

But that’s a bit embarrassing isn’t it.  You know I’m the kind of person who lectures others about why it’s worth spending a little extra time checking things too.

So anyway, any Polarshield-based products you buy for the foreseeable future will have this ugly little hack on it.  It’ll get neater over time, and have a bit of tape on top so should be robust.  I’m publishing it here and have fixed the eagle PCB files for in the future.

The Malthusian Paradox is an ARG, or rather “An immersive transmedia narrative experience, played out online and in real life” that is currently is running in Nottingham – have a look here http://malthusianparadox.com/?p=208.

The project uses a couple of Polargraph machines, along with Adam Sporne’s exciting Drawnomic machine in it to reveal, slowly some clues – I’m excited to see how it turns out!

Nice work here from Dan Royer – including a very clear and illuminating write-up of the maths behind hanging-v plotters and this grand acceleration / movement scheme.

His code looks like it could be more efficient and elegant than mine, and its clarity is refreshing, so I’m interested in either adapting it, or just using it outright.  Prompting me to think about moving to a g-code based language too – it kind of does make sense.  Just not sure how to deal with the dual coordinates system (native and cartesian).

No impressive results in terms of actual drawings on the site, but have a dig around and there’s some really nice stuff.

Just came across this brilliant drawing machine on Norwegian Creation’s blog.

What a handsome gondola!  And the quality of the drawing is beautiful – would love to have a peep at their software.  The enviable sharpness, I guess, is a product of the big brass weight that keeps the whole thing very tight.  It uses a variable-width line – but doesn’t seem to have identifiable “pixels” as such, I wonder how it does it.

Beautiful curated randomness from this talented fellow.

http://tristanperich.com/Art/Machine_Drawings/

Ho ho ho!

Well, thank you all for your support this year, hope you’re not regretting it!

Software updates:

• New straight lines.  I have improved C17, the “draw straight line” command.  This now works!  More or less.  There’s still a subtle curve to some lines, with some orientations being more pronounced than others.  This works by splitting the line into lots of little bits, and so although close up they’ll look a little wiggly, overall they should be straight.  And certainly a lot straighter than the old “fastest move” method.  The button for this is “move direct”.  The number of sub-lines it gets chopped into is controlled with “<” and “>” (max segment length).
• Speedometer.  The motor speed and acceleration speed are both now specified as absolute values rather than relative ones.  The current speed and acceleration is shown in the info overlay, and the keyboard controls are the same, that is “*” and “/” to change the acceleration, and “+” and “-” to change the max speed.
• Values of motor speed, acceleration and pen tip width are preloaded into the queue on start up.  This should keep things in sync better.
• Command queue line drawing preview.  This is a little thing, but hints at the next big thing for polargraph machines – vector graphics.  Andy Kinsman has done some brilliant work on writing a little PostScript interpreter that will convert PostScript vector graphics output into line commands for the Polargraph.  This is the best thing that’s happened to polargraphs since ever.  He has a wiki page on the code site and I haven’t had a chance to play with it properly, but hope to get into it over the holidays. It’s very exciting.  So if you load a queue full of C17 commands into the controller, you’ll have a little display of what it might look like drawn.  It’s primitive so far, but this is just the beginnings.

Darcy Whyte has been busy, and has a very neat new gondola and motor bracket design showing off at http://mambohead.com/category/drawbot/.

This is really good, and a fine improvement on mine – looks configurable.  Would be good to get the plans into the project repository.

Thank you to everybody who bought kits and vitamin packs from me – the last few of you will have your machines heading out to you during next week and will probably get yours in the new year.

But that’s them all gone!  It’s kind of fun running a little factory, but those of you who are still waiting will agree that I haven’t managed it terrifically well, and my wife deserves to get her living room back, so I will not be offering kits again in the foreseeable future.

That said, I’ve got 20 machines worth of cord and sprockets leftover, so if anybody wants those bits I can still sell you some of them.