Experiments with AxiDraw, a CNC plotter

I’ve been really impressed with the engineering and software for the AxiDraw I bought recently. Here are some of the first experiments I’ve made with mine.

The first batch of experiments are grids of crosses—these are variations on one of the first motifs I ever messed with via software, back in 2002 (it was a Director project then, I miss Lingo!). You can access a superset of hte scripts used to generate the shapes here at the paperJS “sketch” site, which is an awesome and fast way to generate SVGs while tweaking code. Here are some sample outputs:

…I also started playing with Inkscape’s “Trace Bitmap” options and trying to SVG-ize some Haeckel prints I have from a Media Lab colleague’s old blog. For these, I still need to figure out how to batch-trace the original bitmaps. I am liking the results of some of the dual-color drawings I’m making here, in which I very slightly offset or scale the second color rendering, for a bouncy, vibrating feel to the pieces.