There's no reason why this wouldn't work in principle, especially the pinpricks if you get the pen lift to drop it quick enough.

Moving some kind of blade up will be ok but moving down, or from side to side, there'll be a lot of friction to overcome to get things moving - that's going to be a very hit-and-miss process.

There's machines like the Cricut (and a bunch of others) that use these little knives on swivels, so they just cut in whichever direction they are driven in. Manual ones too.

I always assumed that whatever cutting system I used, it would have to be powered itself, like a drill or a nailgun, or Dremel or whatnot, so that the actual pressure required to move around would always be pretty low - certainly less than would be required to cut / impact the material itself.

sn

anyone (especially kongo or sn) know how to make the polargraph desktop program draw vector _points_ and not strokes?

what i want to do is have a pattern of dots/points where the program will compile a queue that will come out like:
...
C01,1146,1554,END
C13,90,END
C14,187,END
C01,1254,1557,END
C13,90,END
C14,187,END
...

as in, go to a point, pen drop, pen lift, go to other point, pen drop, pen lift etc.

what happens is that i make a dot pattern in illustrator, save it as SVG and then push it to the program. what then happens is it either does not recognise just the individual points (i'm guessing that the program scan for paths) or it sees the outline stroke of the dot as the path it needs to draw:
...
C17,1173,1349,2,END
C17,1172,1349,2,END
C17,1172,1350,2,END
C14,END
C17,1241,1320,2,END
C13,END
...

i can do this in the program itself (how i got the example queue) but want to be able to do something in illustrator or photoshop and then push it to the program so that it will do the coding for me.

if this is not possible i am brainstorming on an MS Excel formula that will extract what i want from the queue.

p.s. my girlfriend has been helping me with the machine from a designer's point of view and she and i wonder if editing PEN SIZE before drawing the vector would do anything?

i'm not running anything from source so i won't be able to hack it. didn't you make a dot-to-dot drawing a couple of years ago? maybe that was just my imagination.

i think i kinda get what you mean but can you clarify what you mean by the proper way?

what i'm looking to do is something like this:

the above is not my own artwork but i've been doing similar things for a while, both the artist and i have to work by hand and its a pain but the end result is amazing.

if i can replicate the technique with the machine i would be so happy.

currently still testing with the program to generate code from different line lengths.