A friend of mine had a plotter in which he substituted an Exacto type knife blade for the pen, and plotted into vinyl (with adhesive backing) which allowed for some amazing stuff.
He did some wild murals with it (varied colors).
Pen Plotter Art and Algorithms
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Pen Plotter Art and Algorithms
#12A friend of mine had a plotter in which he substituted an Exacto type knife blade for the pen, and plotted into vinyl (with adhesive backing) which allowed for some amazing stuff. He did some wild murals with it (varied colors).
I can recommend the Cricut Explore Air for this. The software is janky but the machine works great for cutting out vinyl, paper, etc. Also takes pens which means I can do my own generative plotting (once I buy some pens / an adaptor.)
Re: Pen Plotter Art and Algorithms
#13Traditional pen plotters usually don't take ordinary pens and run on HPGL instead of G-Code (and I for one find HPGL a lot easier to generate and debug). The AxiDraw sure looks awesome, but you can probably pick up four working used HP 7475A pen plotters or similar on eBay for the AxiDraw's US$475 price. There's an introduction to HPGL at http://www.tobiastoft.com/posts/an-intro-to-pen-plotters . It's really easy, an…
That article is great. I'm going to add it to the blog post and mention the HP plotter.
I have the Axidraw at work and its a pretty competent machine.
Re: Pen Plotter Art and Algorithms
#14Traditional pen plotters usually don't take ordinary pens and run on HPGL instead of G-Code (and I for one find HPGL a lot easier to generate and debug). The AxiDraw sure looks awesome, but you can probably pick up four working used HP 7475A pen plotters or similar on eBay for the AxiDraw's US$475 price. There's an introduction to HPGL at http://www.tobiastoft.com/posts/an-intro-to-pen-plotters . It's really easy, an…
> you can probably pick up four working used HP 7475A pen plotters or similar on eBay for the AxiDraw's US$475 price
Will they plug into my mac via USB? And run off of a open source, easily available piece of software?
And if not, how much do you think those features are worth?