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

I've been toying with the idea of cool automatically generated plots for the Unicorn pen plotter. This one is an experiment in laying out a tweet for plotting on a sticky note.

It should be possible, layer, to use this as a template for creating new plots! Could be kind of fun.

Feel free to grab the file on Thingiverse.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6425

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

I made this version of the Baltimore Node logo the other day in Inkscape, but wasn't at home to test it. Here are the resulting plots on both EggBot and Unicorn!

The Unicorn version came out a little messed up due to my sizing the file wrong - the pen went off the edge of my sticky note pad and mussed everything up. I resized the plot to fit the sticky note fine, but had some pen registration issues with the now-crumpled sticky note pad. I'll probably try this again later with some nicer stock.

New files and more detailed description over on Thingiverse.

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

Today I made some improvements to the inkscape-unicorn plotter extension that I released yesterday.

Specifically, I've added two things:

• The option to do a pen-registration check at the beginning of each plot, taken from mifga's original.
• The option to set where "home" is, for people who like to start their plots with the platform anywhere other than in the center.

This should help make some nice plots!

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

I spent some time this weekend making this plugin and today went through the process of releasing it via GitHub and posting it to Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5986

One problem that has often plagued users of the MakerBot Unicorn is the long and confusing chain of tools required to go from a nice vector drawing to a G-Code file that can be plotted from ReplicatorG.

mifga did an awesome tutorial that made it possible to understand the steps needed to work all of these tools, but it was obvious that something better was needed.

So, I made a mashup of scribbles.py and the Egg-Bot Driver for Inkscape to bring you the inkscape-unicorn extension for Inkscape!

Once installed, this extension allows you to save files in “MakerBot Unicorn G-Code (*.gcode)” format!

Learn more, download, and contribute at the GitHub page for this project:

https://github.com/martymcguire/inkscape-unicorn

If you’re desperate, you can also download the zip file attached to this thing, but please consider getting the latest version from GitHub. :)

Thanks to langfordw for the original Unicorn Logo used as an example on this Thing.