The MH871-MKII Pen Plotter and Vinyl Cutter is an affordable Plotter/Cutter. The MH871-MKII uses the HPGL (Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language) standard to drive the print head.MH871-MKII uses a limited subset of the HPGL standard:
- Initialize – IN;
- Pen Up command – PU
- Pen Down command – PD
- Pen Absolute to an X,Y point – PAX,Y
Using this knowledge I created an openFrameworks addon to directly drive the plotter from an openFrameworks application. The openFrameworks addon can be found on my github page.
For my drawing app I created an application to generate drawings from images and draw them using the pen plotter. I experimented with several openCV features to extract lines and contours from images. My final app utilized coherent line drawing (CLD) and simple thresholding + blob detection to generate self portraits and portraits of others. I combined several dithering and halftoning techniques to give the drawings more texture and depth.
