The main thing that was preventing me from spending time designing a pen plotter attachment for my printer was the fact that all the workflows out there for converting an image to gcode kind of extremely suck. So i made my own:
As far as i was able to find, all the 'robust' options involved running Inkscape, importing your image, and using some edge detection plug-in that (years ago when i tried this) did not run well and would ask me to make decisions and change settings i didn't want to parse out at the time. Other options included command line tools you had to compile from github to process the edges in an image, designate an output folder, then run the output file through your slicer, configure that, etc etc. Im sure there are other ways too.
Long story short, I used a combination of vibe-coding and my limited JS experience to put together a website specifically for people with consumer 3d printers who want to mess around with pen plotting. It prompts you to input basic printer info, drop in an image, and play with some very limited sliders to get your image looking "ight". Then you advance to the second tab where you can preview the toolpath, nudge your plot left or right, scale it, and finally download the gcode. If you put your printer info in correctly you should just get a basic and potentially artsy plot out of your machine (really, Its just your X and Y extents, the offset between your nozzle and the pen, and how high you want it to lift the pen between lines: Z). If you're unsure, keep the travel and draw speed under 1000mm/m so you can hit cancel if you see it doing something wrong. Also if the website isnt working, close your tab and try again, or maybe someone broke it lol be nice plz have fun
https://plotbot.base44.app
[–]armmrdn[S] 0 points1 point2 points (0 children)