I’ve been doing some more work on my Processing-Plotter setup. The current plan is to amass a collection of Processing sketches which perform various plotter functions - initialization, scaling, shade modes, layers, shapes, communication etc. - and then put them together as a Processing library.

This is fun for me, but like the initial circle drawing test it’s not very interesting visually, so I decided to remix Mr Nibbles as a plot.

My current procedure for outputting plotter-compatible files goes like this: Illustrator > Export as Autocad DWG file > Open in Autocad and save as .PLT (HPGL Plotter file) > Copy .PLT file to serial port.
Unfortunately somewhere in the journey Mr Nibbles became corrupted, as you’ll quickly see:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://createdigitalmotion.com/images/2006/august/plottervid.swf" width="320" height="240" base="http://createdigitalmotion.com/images/2006/august/" /]

The Software Side

I’ve never been much of a programmer. This often comes as a slight shock to those who know me. That someone with so much generalised computer knowledge - and who incidentally spends so much of his time in front of 3 monitors and surrounded by shiny stuff - is unable to fully control the machines that take up his so much of his time. It’s analogous to a revhead admitting that he doesn’t know the first thing about stripping down engines. To compound the shame, my father (a civil engineer) has been programming since the 70s. Growing up there was always a computer in the house, and he encouraged me to learn BASIC as a kid, but for some reason it never really stuck. I knew that the code existed, I’ve been able to hack existing PHP, SQL and Javascript to make it do what I want, and I’m very keen on After Effects expressions, but I’ve never really taken the time to properly learn the fundamentals of programming.