Cool beans, glad it's improved things. I basically nicked the acceleration / deceleration algorithm from the accelstepper, and applied it to the short line segments that the straight line routine uses.

I would like to have a preview of the vector filter available, so maybe that'll be something I'll work on.

The outline box behaviour is like that by design, it was really designed to offer a kind of preview of the area that is selected rather than as a way of drawing a box, so there's no pen lift/drop behaviour. For drawing, I usually raise the pen, then issue the "draw box" command, and then, when the pen gets to the first point, I use the button on the screen to drop the pen while it's drawing. Or do it twice, once with the pen lifted, then drop the pen, and do it again.

sn

A preview would be superb, but I'm sure you have a real life or something rather than fiddling about with the code for this 🙂
With the new superspeedy vector code I have been able to do a new vector drawing in just a few hours today. The high pass filter reduced the number of commands from 33k to 14k, so that, along with the faster drawing really kept things bowling along. The filter setting I used still left me with some overdrawing, so I paused and swapped pens from cyan to black and then added a red border (using technique above as noted). Fun fun fun! Whaddya think?
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30890400/Speccy-polargraph1.jpg

Hey Sandy,
nice works as evs.
found a ..bug? - pen is not automatically lifted after vector drawing now.
also - don't try to load jpeg images with 300dpi. freeze-o-matic. was a bit silly anyway so i changed to 72dpi and that works just fine 🙂 - but in case anybody is stuck with their freeze-a-reasoning.

Currently bigging up your software in Helsinki at the aalto media fablab, part of #okfn open knowledge fest. i think i may be leaving them a machine to play with themselves

Just today I came home to find a finished vector drawing with the pen still on the page, so I can corroborate sc_r's bug report. Luckily I was using a coated stock, so the ink circle was hardly larger than the line in the rest of the drawing.

On the other hand, I awoke this morning to find a vector drawing (nearly the same drawing as before) had finished earlier than I thought it would, and the pen was up. Weird. (It wasn't until the drawing was underway that I realized I should've added a pen up, as you suggest). It's a good thing the pen was up, because the automatic "motors off" had triggered, and the gondola had settled in the middle of the drawing. Now that I think of it, the drawing that ended with the pen staying down had probably been sitting long enough for the motors to power down, but they didn't. I'm not certain about that, though.