I don't think I ever posted this piece. It's 54 windmills in increasing stages of construction. It's pen-plotted with green ink on cotton paper. Each of the mills is generated using some python code...
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The paper is sourced from the "Schoolmeester", and old paper mill in Westzaan (north of Amsterdam). It's drawn with this big plotter I built from a drafting table, a raspberry pi + arduino, stepper motors, and some 3d printed mounts
That's really cool! I'm currently designing my first Arduino-controlled mechanism with some similar X-Y axis movement. I've never used Raspberry Pi before though- was it difficult to learn how to control?
It's kinda easy to control, but it takes GCode as an input and converting SVG to Gcode is not as easy as it seems on the surface, lots of edgecases. This worked well for me:
Fully procedural. All Dutch windmills from that era are built similarly, so none of these mills exist, but each of them could, given that there were hundreds in that area alone. It's not real 3D even, just some 2D lines shifted with sin/cos
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https://thomaskole.nl/2023/11/07/plotter/
It's kinda easy to control, but it takes GCode as an input and converting SVG to Gcode is not as easy as it seems on the surface, lots of edgecases. This worked well for me:
https://github.com/sameer/svg2gcode/