This one took 21 hours to draw. I think it was worth the wait. A little James Taylor on a sunny Saturday afternoon after 5" of snow…
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Wall Mounted Pen Plotter - Things You’ve Made - V1 Engineering Forum
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Very nice! Did you use Drawingbot? How big are the gcode files? Do you use a separate CAM, or do you generate the gcode directly in Drawing? I never looked into the gcode exporter, but I think it would simplify the process, skipping the whole CAM step.
Technically I don’t use Drawingbot so I can’t answer all of your questions. I do use the same Java source code that Drawingbot is based on, so I’m guessing that it would spit out something similar if you set it up the same. The image I used for this required a bit of manipulation in a photo editor prior to running it through the conversion code. I use an old version of Photoshop for that and if it doesn’t have the filters I need, then I revert to the latest version of Gimp.
I’ve tweaked the java code (that Drawingbot is based on) to fit the pens I use as well as generate the gcode specific to my plotter. So, I load the image file, try a few different conversion algorithms to see what works best for the image, then find a good balance between pens and total drawing time. Once everything looks good, I click a button and it spits out a jpg of what the final plot should look like as well as some svg files of each pen and the gcode. This particular plot was broken up into 2 pens. The first pen was a 3 1/2 hour plot, gcode size was 670K (32,500 line segments with a total distance around 800 ft.). The second pen took 18 hours (it ran out of ink at the 12 1/2 hour mark, so I manually swapped in a new pen) and the gcode file size was 4.5Mb (218,800 line segments with a total distance around 3850 ft.). Now that I know the ink limits of the pens, I can tweak the code to grab a new pen at a designated line distance. My UI has the option to plot each pen’s gcode separately or combine everything into a single plot. Just need to make sure the correct pens are loaded before I click Go.
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If you are looking for specific Photoshop filters that may not be available in your old version, you might take look at Photopea. It is a web-based Photoshop clone.
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That’s is amazing 
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Thanks for sharing!
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