Home › Evil Mad Scientist Forums › Ask an Evil Mad Scientist › Automated drawing bot help › Re: Automated drawing bot help
August 18, 2015 at 4:17 am
#22279
Windell Oskay
Keymaster
> Is the wbc drawing components dependant on inkscape? If so would it be scriptable to specify a svg to be drawn?
The WaterColorBot driver for Inkscape is built as an Inkscape extension, and does rely upon Inkscape. So far as I know, Inkscape does not provide a scripting ability that can automatically call this extension.
However
(1) It is only one of several available interfaces that can be used to control the WaterColorBot/AxiDraw/EggBot (or other machines based upon the EBB), and
(2) The Inkscape extension is a plain-text python file, and the Inkscape features that it uses are almost exclusively to manage its GUI. If you wanted to, it should be reasonably straightforward to pick out the “good parts” and call them from a different context in a python script.
(3) It may be possible to use a macro-script to control Inkscape, even outside of its normal intended scripting ability. What would you actually need to automate? Two menu items, ultimately: File> Revert and Extensions > Previous Extension. Those two in combination with changing the contents of the SVG file programatically would be sufficient to do what you need.
Obviously, for RoboPaint and RoboPaint RT, Inkscape is not whatsoever involved.
> Does any of the other software have little/no dependancies on user input in their drawing components?
I’m afraid that I don’t understand this question. Which other software, and what “drawing components” do you mean?
> Can I run any of your software through a terminal specifying a svg file either via terminal or code.
Yes. For example, by using RoboPaint’s API, which allows you to just send an SVG file to print.
However, in many cases it is nicer to go through Inkscape, for example if you want to give it exact curves to trace, rather than an SVG to try and approximate. RoboPaint and the Inkscape extensions work very differently “under the hood.” Since you’re programmatically generating the data, you might also want to skip the SVG stage altogether, and directly control the EBB through the CNCServer API built into RoboPaint– that allows direct “goto x,y” type control over the behavior of the robot.