I spent part of Saturday working on my latest plotter project.

We spend a lot of our time making art with pen plotters, and I’ve become really interested in all aspects of the machines – from the varied combinations of inks, pens, and papers that can be used to create unique and individual designs, to the software and hardware of the devices themselves.

The primary two plotters that we use in the studio are an AxiDraw, and a Roland DYX-1100. I’ve also built a BrachioGraph, and a hanging Polargraph. My current project is a CoreXY plotter.

This is a series of modifications on top of a basic plotter kit that I picked up on AliExpress. By default, the plotter comes with a clone Arduino UNO board, and a motor shield. It’s a cheap(ish) kit, that came with some largely pictorial assembly instructions, and far too many parts. You can read a write-up of a similar machine over here.

The majority of these kinds of devices run GRBL, an Arduino firmware that works with Gcode – I already did a lot of hacking with that as part of the Pico-based polagraph project, and I was also looking for a way to improve the speed and configurability as well as adding wireless connectivity. So, instead of sticking with the vanilla build, I decided I was going to upgrade the machine to FluidNC, which is a newer firmware based on ESP32.

I’ve replaced the Arduino attached to one side of the X axis, with a FluidNC board with 2 TMC2209 motor controllers. On top of that, I added some copper heatsinks on the motor drivers. I still need to design and print a new box holder for the controller, to replace the one I removed from the plotter – I don’t actually want that to be floating around on a nest of wires off the side of the machine.

In addition, I’ve added limit switches on the negative (min) sides of the X and Y axes; wired them via the existing cable holes; and, replaced the original coiled plastic cable covers with better quality cable sleeves. I’m pleased with these improvements. There’s technically the option to add another pair of limit switches on the max sides of the axes, but I wasn’t intending to add them as well.

So far, so good; well, I’m happy with things on the hardware side, at least. I made the modifications one by one, and I can see the limit switches tripping when the axes run through the homing process.

The largest issue I’m having is the calibration. I haven’t changed the motors or the dimensions of the machine, but, I’m also not confident that the GRBL build on the Arduino was accurate in the first place (the plotter came with a zip of various bits of code, but I’m not sure that it reflects the specifics of the plotter), so I’m not completely sure that the parameters directly transfer to the FluidNC configuration. This is not straightforward for me – although I’m a coder, I’m not always great at the mathematical side of things, and between spindles, rotations, steps, and power ratios, I’m having “fun”. Although I’ve got most of a working FluidNC config, there’s clearly something off in the settings, as I’m still (!) seeing the machine try to shoot past the limits, and then I have to pull the power.

Once I’ve got this working, I’ve also got a couple more DIY-build plotter projects in mind… if only I have the room for them all…

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#100DaysToOffload #cnc #drawingMachine #fluidcnc #hardware #penPlotter #plotter #Technology #xy

Last year, I gave a number of talks on the subject of pen plotters / drawing machines, and how they have been used in different ways to realise different forms of art.

I wasn’t immediately able to share the main talk (the closing keynote from QCon London 2024), but I posted about the shorter edition that I delivered at Electromagnetic Field, and I’ve also written about the distinction between computer art generated using algorithms, and generative AI creations.

It took some time for the video to become available to share, but you can now take a look at the closing keynote that began it all, on the InfoQ website: Where is the Art? a History in Technology. I really enjoyed researching the subject.

This year, I plan to tinker with building more of my own plotters, in different formats.
Plotting with paint
Next up, we have our sixth (!) Wimbledon Art Fair – next month, May 8-11. We’re still working with the plotter and pouring paints, and have upgraded from the AxiDraw A4 SE to a larger NextDraw 1117 for some of our more recent work. If you’re in the neighbourhood, do come and take a look!

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#100DaysToOffload #art #creativity #forgeAndCraft #history #info1 #infoq #penPlotter #plotterArt #qcon #Technology #wimbledonArtFair #wimbledonArtStudios

Andy Piper

2024-07-30 17:16:50

I’ve given some talks in the past 6 months about the history of computer art, and in particular art created with pen plotters and drawing machines. As I got into building plotters last year, I didn’t initially think too much about the background to what I was doing; but, being an historian, I then started to dig into it, looking back to the emergence of computer art of the 1950s and 1960s.

My personal favourite piece, Schotter (“Gravel”) by Georg Nees, was made using an algorithm.

At a high level, it’s a simple and very effective rule – draw a square; repeat, adding a small but increasing amount of rotation (noise) with each column and row. Such a basic piece of code produces a wonderful and pleasing – to my eyes – “disintegration” effect. My description is a very simplistic way of understanding the code – more recently, Zellyn Hunter has done a fabulous two part deep dive on the program, going as far as recovering the random seed used to create the specific piece of work that is part of the collection at the V&A Museum in London¹. Until about a month ago I had an alternate / approximated version² hanging just inside the door of the studio, and thanks to Zellyn I now have a precise recreation generated from Python, plotted using my own machine, on fine black paper using gold ink.
Schotter, in the V&A Museum, LondonRecreation of Schotter, Forge & Craft studio, London
In my talks, I’ve joked that we can think of these in-their-time “magical” programs as being like AI, but in old school terms, they are just algorithms.

To say that today’s AI is “just algorithms” would be ridiculously reductive – that form of AI involves not just algorithms, but vast Large Language Models that inform the outcomes of the generated art or text or code; but ultimately it is just super-powered autocorrect and applied statistics³, which derives superpowers from the corpus of data that it has been trained on. I completely understand the concerns around how that data is being acquired and (mis)used, and the skepticism and trepidation and other reasons folks have to disdain “AI”.⁴

One of the common things we get asked when showing our plotter art is, literally: "where is the art in this?" (thus the title and inspiration for my talk); or "so, the computer did it / it's all done with AI then?" (the implication being that we didn’t really make any creative effort of our own).

In our (Forge & Craft case), the work tends to divide between two types and styles (not exclusively, but mostly):

• things I generated using code, mostly experimenting in different languages and frameworks as I learn – this is usually referred to as “generative art”;
• images taken as photographs by one of us, transformed into plottable line art using algorithms (we use DrawingBotV3 for this, it has an amazing range of path finding modules, excellent support, and solid knowledge of a range of different plotters including output to Inkscape SVG for AxiDraw, or to HPGL for my vintage plotter).

Is that “AI”? No – we’re not using what is known as generative AI in those cases. I have, of course, experimented with tools like Midjourney and so forth for some limited image generation, and for some coding assistance – I’m a curious technologist, and I like to explore new tools – but, in terms of putting down the lines in the plots, we’re using algorithms to derive the pen paths.

We also work with analogue materials i.e. the pens and inks and papers are themselves an artistic set of choices. Take a couple of my other pieces, 1984, and Cellular.

The piece on the left is a Cistercian numeral or cipher. I used Python code to generate the glyph here; I used DrawingBotV3 to process the SVG into a plottable format (a close look would reveal it is a dense squiggly line fill); this was plotted using sepia fineliner onto cotton rag paper. The piece on the right was made using an online generation tool, and plotted using bronze Uniball onto the same cotton rag paper.

In both cases I’m showing the dichotomy of ostensibly old formats (handmade paper, Cistercian numerals) and modernity (the notion of “1984” be it the Orwellian, or the Apple ad; the bronze metallic ink); and doing that via the physicality of analogue output. Oh, as a side note, this cotton rag paper is pretty challenging to plot onto – it undulates so the pen can easily drag unexpectedly, and I found that some “babysitting” of the machine was required. No AI there.

In relation to the analog element, I love these words from Freya Marshall in the recent book Tracing the Line:

… to see an image take shape, line by line, is […] hypnotic. In the age of social media, where hour-long plots can be condensed into 20-second videos that are instantly attention-grabbing, it is not difficult to see how the pen plotter has risen in popularity […]

Freya Marshall, Tracing the Line

Another author, Carl Lostritto, writes beautifully about this in Computational Drawing:

… when drawing with ink, time and material are consequential.

Even though the volume of ink is almost never enough to provide measurable depth, the behavior of the material ink as it interacts with the material paper participates in cuing and undermining depth. Ink affects paper and paper affects ink. […]

Ironically, pen-plotters, machines that move a physical pen in two axes across paper, were marketed as output devices for architectural and engineering technical drawings. Now, almost all have been re-appropriated by artists, designers, and architects who cherish them for the very qualities that made them obsolete.

Carl Lostritto, Computational Drawing

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My blog post today was prompted by being asked whether the generative art stickers I wrote about, created by my friend bleeptrack, use AI. Well, first of all, it’s not my art so I’m not going to go deep into explaining or defending the work itself (there is an explainer and video on the website, and both mention the generative and algorithmic nature of the pieces). Secondly I coincidentally also saw today, an excellent piece by Monokai that seeks to separate algorithmic art from generative art and from AI, for many of the same reasons I’ve done above – it also mentions a number of the original algorithmic artists from the 1960s. I also prefer to specify that I’m talking about computer art in my historical coverage, rather than digital art or net art or demo party art (or or or…), which are distinct genres. By the way, folks like Rev Dan Catt are doing some incredible work with AI: creating a personalised assistant, Kitty; and applying the technology tools and his amazing brain to creating ever more impressive artwork – see his Artist Statement.

I’m not here to bash on “AI”, but I do want to draw some distinctions around how and when and where tools are used, and assumptions are made. I’m no apologist for OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and others; I’m an informed skeptic. A kneejerk reaction of “AI = bad” does not take account of how the term “AI” is being misused everywhere to justify investments and valuations – a lot of stuff we previously labelled “algorithmic” is suddenly a flashy new “AI feature”, when it remains simply a complex set of advanced computing techniques and mathematics; equally, separating out an assumption that all “AI” is the result of misappropriated data in a large language model, is important.

Finally, I don’t have videos from the talks I’ve given (at QCon, and at EMF) available to link to at the moment, but I made a small webpage with more information and links to my sources, if you would like to do more reading around the topics of the history of computer art, pen plotters, and how to get involved. I hope you find that interesting and useful!

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1. I visited the V&A earlier this year and asked to spend time examining this piece, and several other early computer art pieces, in the reading room – part of my research for the “Where Is The Art?” talk. ↩︎
2. I generated a version using the Whiskers library in Rust, which comes with a handy interactive demo GUI for playing with the same style of piece. ↩︎
3. It is also not Intelligent, just backed by a lot of data that makes it sound clever. ↩︎
4. I am particularly angered by the underhand approaches that various organisations are taking, intentionally subverting and ignoring long-held internet norms and contracts like robots.txt, but that’s a different blog post, for another day. ↩︎

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#100DaysToOffload #art #Books #computerArt #digitalArt #generativeAi #generativeArt #penPlotter #plotterArt #presentations #Reading #schotter

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)

Hundreds of sites have put old Anthropic scrapers on their blocklist, while leaving a new one unblocked.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

#weeklyreview 15/2025

burger crafting

On Monday I spontaneously did some burgers as I had the bun’s left over from the weekend. Invited kiddo over and got some bacon, almost burned the buns and finally assembled the damn thing. The bacon makes the difference 😀

Backup

Was looking into restic backup with rclone to nextcloud. Restic is a really fifty command line utility to do encrypted backups. Either to local directories or attached volumes or to remote destinations. Restic supports a whole bunch of remotes out of the box.

It can be extended to further destinations by using “rclone” … another command line utility that tries to provide an abstraction of remote filesystems.

My goal was to use a NextCloud file storage as restic destination. You can theoretically just the NextCloud desktop client and backup to the local folder that is synced to the NextCloud server. But this way you have to have the storage space for the original AND the backup available locally. I wanted to use NextCloud as a remote storage without syncing to the local files.

So I chose a folder on the NextCloud server which I have excluded from syncing to my local machine (you can do this in the settings of your NextCloud client). Created an rclone configuration for NextCloud following the documentation. And then just backup to the rclone destination:

restic -r rclone:nxtcld:restic-backups/work-macbook backup ./Downloads/Instagram-Backup

Why all this hassle? Because Hetzner is offering StorageShares based on NextCloud at a pretty good price point. Beside using it as mere document sharing space, one can also use it as a backup destination.

macOS Update issues

Im still struggling to update my personal macOS sitting on an external disk to the latest version of 15.4. Apparently Apple has an issue in that version with this particular update type as many others report the same problem. Updating macOS sitting on an external disk seems to fail. Some users claim success , but it’s unclear what they did differently. I’ve tried a whole bunch of attempts already that include turning off FileVault (as the issue seems to relate to encryption) and also installing from a USB stick. No luck so far 🙁

Heating repair

Our floor heating was broken since last year. It didn’t fully turn off in one room. Trying to find a company to repair this wasn’t easy. Most companies I contacted didn’t reply at all or never came back to me after a first attempt. So I had to pull the vitamin b card and call my cousin who runs a very successful plumbing company in the south of Berlin. They were sweet and nice, kept all the appointments and called back when promised. And not because their boss is my cousin. So eventually their guy was there this week to fix the probably broken actor motor of one of the valves. let’s see how long this fixes the issue.

US Colleagues visit

This week we also had two colleagues from the US over. First time in several years that work related travel in the “lower ranks” was approved. Been in a workshop with some AWS folks for two days. That was intense but also good to spend focused time with the whole team on a topic.

And of course there were the obligatory team dinners.

Dinner again

It almost became a tradition to have dinner over at my friends place. This week it was deliciously roasted chicken on the menu. Also some other substances were involved that I didn’t felt the effect of yet 😉

Kiddo requested pasta with salmon and tomato cream sauce as she recently had in a restaurant. So we gave that recipe a try and kiddo approved. Super simple to make actually. We might see this more often now.

Spring finally

It’s getting warmer outside and finally the trees and bushes started to push leaves and blossoms. So I had to do my share of taking and posting pictures of blossoming trees and bushes. Here you go.

Back in the countryside I enjoyed coffee outside on the terrace with my glorious golden mug.

You can see our tomato and chilli seedlings in the background. They eagerly wait to get outside. But we need to be sure the nights are free of frost for sure. We but planted a few herbs and vegetables on the refurbished raised beets on the weekend and also started the well pump.

That pump started immediately to pump water without any fiddling. This also seems to reflect the high level of ground water this year. Although the surface soil is super dry as it hasn’t rained in quite a while substantially. But the trenches in the fields and in the forest are actually filled with water which I haven’t noticed in years in our area.

Knitting

Kiddo found an old blanket he had started several years ago but didn’t finish. So he picket it up and is running through quite some wool now.

New Hardware

It was about time to replace the old 2012 MacBook Air of my wife. With all this taxation kerfuffle going on, it might be a good time to get something new out. Also the current generation of MacBook Air M4 has just arrived and got really good reviews.

#backup #enEN #food #gardening #knitting #mac #MacBook #macOS #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick