Printer as a Line Plotter?
I'm experimenting for days now to make a Plotter out of my Anet A8 with a Pen mount - just as a fun project. The results (to keep it positive) let plenty of room for improvement... what i did (and this was the only way i found) is rasterize it with photoshop first to a greyscale, than to a bitmap. so lighter grey than are fewer dots in a area, and darker grey are plenty dots in a area - its like a b/w image in a very old newspaper.
To make gcode out of it is (afaik) is using inkscape (with is a pain on a mac) and 'Trace Bitmap' to get paths out of the image and than send it to a also very strange plugin called Gcodetools who finaly does sometimes make a *.ngc out of it. Of course i need to manually rework the whole code, deleting all Speed informations.
The result is kind of circle where a dot should be, and 100% black areas not even filled out.
What I'm looking for is a way (onlinetool, mac-software,...) who can convert a image to gcode wich is lowering the pen where a dot should be and uppering where is nothing to draw. the whole thing line by line, bidirectional or unidirectional to avoid a backlash on the carrier. I know that lasercutters in egravemode does similar (excluding the grey-to-pwm topic now) - but wich software did they use for it, and is such available for a mac too?
thankful for any suggestion.
regards, chris
To make gcode out of it is (afaik) is using inkscape (with is a pain on a mac) and 'Trace Bitmap' to get paths out of the image and than send it to a also very strange plugin called Gcodetools who finaly does sometimes make a *.ngc out of it. Of course i need to manually rework the whole code, deleting all Speed informations.
The result is kind of circle where a dot should be, and 100% black areas not even filled out.
What I'm looking for is a way (onlinetool, mac-software,...) who can convert a image to gcode wich is lowering the pen where a dot should be and uppering where is nothing to draw. the whole thing line by line, bidirectional or unidirectional to avoid a backlash on the carrier. I know that lasercutters in egravemode does similar (excluding the grey-to-pwm topic now) - but wich software did they use for it, and is such available for a mac too?
thankful for any suggestion.
regards, chris