The Unicorn has Leveled Up!

[Marty McGuire]

Hi Folks,

It's been a while since anyone posted here, so I thought I would share some of the work I've been doing to improve the Unicorn experience.

First, I've made a couple of quick one-off tools:

• Sticky Notes - A script to generate banners on sticky notes, one letter at a time.
• gml2unicorn - A script to convert Graffiti Markup Language (GML) files to Unicorn-compatible G-Code. It's really fun to browse #000000book looking for cool things to put on sticky notes. :)

The most important thing I've made for the Unicorn is a Unicorn G-Code Output extension for Inkscape. It's basically a mashup between the EggBot driver and Scribbles.py that:

• Lets you save your file in .gcode format from the Save, Save As, or Save a Copy (recommended) menu.
• Supports plotting preference to match your bot (pen angles, up/down delays, etc.).
• Supports plotting multiple (even infinite!) copies using Matt Griffin's pen registration and page-changing G-Code hacks.
• Includes "homing" options to put the platform in an easy place to change pages between plots.
  
• Lets you plot in multiple colors by grouping lines of different colors into different layers, with a pause before plotting each layer.
  

Today, to go along with the Inkscape driver, I've converted the Hershey Fonts into SVG, so they can be imported into your Inkscape drawings to make text and other cool glyphs that will be plotted efficiently.  You can grab the Hershey SVG fonts on Thingiverse.

I've seen a few new drawings appear on Thingiverse already thanks to these tools, so I'm excited to see what everyone can do with them. Expect some new tutorials for using the Unicorn with the Inkscape plugin in the near future, as well as some other fun things I'm working on for the Unicorn.

Thanks,
Marty