Archive for December 25th, 2017
A Spirograph for Christmas
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, Photography & Images on 2017-12-25
Gotta play with my new toy:
That’s with a set of liquid ink and ceramic tip plotter pens. They’re unbelievably cranky, but produce wonderfully fine lines:
Text comes out exactly the way vector lettering should look:
There’s a slight shake visible at 500 mm/min = 8.3 mm/s, but it’s Good Enough.
All the pen-and-ink traffic around the center produced a ring of damp green fuzz:
The artsy part of the plot ran at 1800 mm/min = 30 mm/s, with little of the wobbulation at 6000 mm/min = 100 mm/s. None of that would matter with a router, of course.
It’s a nice, Christmasy design in kinda-red and sorta-green.
From the stack of plots accumulating near the MPCNC bench:
Plots 7 and 9 show the tape sutures required to produce a 26×18 inch sheet covering the MPCNC’s full work area. The squat plots fit on B-size sheets and the rest come from 17×14 inch artist’s sketchpad sheets.
I used Google PhotoScan to capture and rectangularize paper sheets from the floor or atop the bench, then battered the contrast and crushed the file size with a one-liner:
i=1 ; for f in 1* ; do printf -v dn "Spiro %02d.jpg" $(( i++ )) ; convert $f -level '10,80%' -density 300 -define jpeg:extent=300KB tweaked/"$dn" ; done
The plots look great in person (modulo some incremental software improvements), but the slideshow images look awful because:
- Google PhotoScan produces surprisingly low-res images
- I’m overly compressing the results
They’re not (yet) art and there’s no point in a high-quality workflow.
Enjoy the day …
Blowback