Unicorns: Making it stick
Sketch to Plot
One of my favorite things to turn into Unicorn pen plottings is sketches. On Saturday I took photos of my own pen and ink sketches1 , imported them into Inkscape, and then converted them to GCode. Sketching something once is fun. Cranking out a stack of sticky notes with the same sketch is AWESOME.
Here’s my process for converting sketches:
- Fire up Inkscape.
- I prefer the PortableApps version, but that’s just me.
- Install Schmarty’s Inkscape GCode plugin.
- File -> Import. Import your photo, scan, or picture.
- Path -> Trace Bitmap. This is where you get to have some fun. For black and white sketches, I like to use these settings:
- Grays: checked
- Scans: 2
- Smooth: checked
- Stack scans: checked
- Remove background: checked
- Click to select and then delete the original picture
- File -> Save As.
- File name: Choose a good file name.
- Save as type: MakerBot Unicorn G-Code (*.gcode)
Let me know how it goes!
| Tagged with | inkscape, plugin, schmarty, unicorn | 2 comments |
2 Comments so far
hybot
If you use a Mac, follow Schmarty’s (Marty McGuire’s) suggestion to download Pleasant3D as a previewer. Even without having or using a Unicorn you want this tool. Although the preview in Pleasant3D for STLs isn’t much different than what you can see in RepG, not only can you use it to view GCode in 3D (and step trough it layer by layer), you get the very nice side effect of QuickLook plug-ins to preview both your STL and GCode files right in the finder and file open dialogs. There’s nothing quite like seeing exactly what you’re selecting before you open it.
Pleasant3D has become much more than a previewer, it’s an early development stage of a Mac specific Skeinforge alternative, with lots of promise (and wicked fast). It “only” slices and produces GCode at the moment, but MakerBlock it’s worth tracking for future articles (or a series) as it fleshes out.
hybot
Ah, I see there hasn’t been much public update on Pleasant3D for a while.
Still, the QuickLook plug-ins alone make it quite worthwhile.