Thing-a-Day 2011 #4 - Pen-Changing!

This post used to be on Posterous. I rescued my posts before Posterous shut down and am now sharing them here.

Once again, I'm work on the MakerBot Unicorn G-Code Output extension for Inkscape.

Today's update is kind of a simple-but-clever hack, inspired by the code for EggBot.

It lets you create multi-color plots by putting paths of different colors on different layers. For example to create this image:

I put the text on a layer named "text" and the unicorn logo on a layer named "unicorn".

And selected the new "Pause on layer change?" option!

When plotting, everything pauses before starting a new layer and I get the message "Plotting layer '[LAYERNAME]'". I can use that pause as an opportunity to change out the pen, as I did in this example, using a black pen for the text layer and a blue pen for the unicorn layer.