Image complexity and paper size

[Anonymous]

Hi all, I’ve got my DrawBot humming away quite happily (pictures to follow) and huge credit to Dan for writing the software. I’ve got a couple of questions on it’s operation which I’ve been trying to figure out:

When I use the DrawbotGUI to work on bitmap images, the resulting Gcode files don’t contain anywhere as many points as the example image https://www.marginallyclever.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-Shot-2012-05-31-at-2.43.56-PM.png does. From reading the code, it looks to be related to the size of my drawing area (only A4 size). I modified the DrwabotGUI class to save out the intermediate images as they pass through the filters and the initial resize is related to drawing area, so the image in my case comes out tiny, reducing the number of dithered pixels further down the pipeline.
My guess is that the only way to address this would be to not scale the image, then provide a scaling factor to the Filter_TSPGcodeGenerator class to be able to scale down the dithered points. Does that sound like I’m on the right lines or have I missed something?

Also, when I run the DrawbotGUI, most of the time, the preview area is not shown properly. I just see an area in orange, both before and after loading an image or Gcode file. I have had it working, but cannot yet pinpoint what the difference is. Has anyone else seen this?

My machine setup (in case that’s important) is:

A=20.5
E=10.5
B=26.3
F=14.8
C=-20.5
G=-10.5
D=-26.3
H=-14.8

Thanks

Barny

[Anonymous]

The orange is new. Basically it means that while drawing your pen will be neither up nor down in the orange sections. It’s a way to visually check that your file is good with your current machine settings.

If you change “Adjust Z” so that your values are 90 for up and 0 for down it will probably correct the color.
Also you can re-convert and it will do so with the current up/down values, automatically correcting the color.

In a more perfect world there would be a way to change the DPI or the total number of dots per image.
I’d love to combine StippleGen with this app. Anyone up for a programming challenge?

[Anonymous]

Thanks very much for the pointers! I’l have a play tomorrow (it’s gone midnight here).

I was looking to use stipplegen’s SVG output with the Drawbot software. My approach was to translate the SVG it generates into GCode, then import it into your software, which might allow for a number of input sources. I’ve been using Batik to read and process the SVG source files and have just about got to the point where I can translate most SVG drawing commands into lines, so I think there’s the beginnings of a workable approach there. I’ll write up where I’ve got to in the next couple of days.

Thanks

Barny

[Author]

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