AxiDraw January 2017
Unofficial Python library for working with the AxiDraw pen plotter.
The AxiDraw is a very nice modern pen plotter. It ships with Inkscape-based software for controlling it, but I was more interested in programmatically controlling it myself. So I wrote this library that controls the plotter directly over the USB serial port.
The most interesting part of this project, for me, was writing my own motion planning algorithm. I stuck with constant-acceleration for simplicity, and the code for the planner came out to just a couple hundred lines of Python!
See the motion planning algorithm in action in this web-based visualization.
Features
- control the AxiDraw directly from Python with a simple API
- convenient command-line utility
- constant acceleration (trapezoidal velocity) motion planning
- path drawing order optimization
- drawing transformations
- preview drawing (render to png)
- turtle graphics
- lindenmayer systems
Links: GitHub • Medium Article
