Line-us SVG Plotter

Yes, although you’d need to find the IP - 192.168.4.1 would be correct for ‘Red Mode’ but if it’s connected to your WiFi it would be different. You’d be able to get it by logging in to your router.

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Thanks Rob! I ended up just using the IP address the device was assigned on my home network. Thanks for the other ideas too!

It seemed to work fine on my mac without the need for Bonjour - but that’s good to know for the future. thanks!

Yes, macs have bonjour installed as default, it’s just Windows that needs it. Using the IP address is fine too though.

Hi! I am excited about the SVG Plotter but struggling to make it work. Wondering about system requirements/compatibility? Or maybe I’m doing this wrong.

Issue 1.

  • I connect my Line-us via iPhone app. Then I launch the SVG Plotter app on my Mac running 10.12.1 (Sierra).
  • Line-us is connected to wifi. Address is lineus.local
  • Hit C, text goes green
  • Hit P to draw default venn diagram, nothing happens. App is frozen.

Issue 2.

  • Wondering about the SVG format that is compatible with this app. It seems anything out of Illustrator doesn’t open.

Any help would be super appreciated!

Issue 1:
I suppose the address “lineus.local” might be not correctly resolved. Thus i’ve got several Line-us in class we are putting the drawbot in debug mode (red LED) and connect directly to the provided wifi network. The IP is 192.168.4.1. Maybe you could try that.
There are other discussions on this board regarding the address.

Issue 2:
The SVG interpreter is quite simple. Thus there may be some SVG commands or effects that might not work. Similar to other drawing programs like VisiCut.
You should try to avoid SVG effects and patterns. And please try to merge your paths and convert your fonts to path.
Illustrator provides several ways to export SVGs. There’s only one that flattens transforms. Unfortunately i don’t remember which one.

Try line-us.local for the address (so hit ‘a’ and enter line-us.local). The default name has a hyphen.

Hi everyone,

thanks for creating Line-us and the Line-us SVG plotter.

I really want to just draw out simple images from SVG files with Line-Us but I’m having real trouble with making it work.

I am unable to load my SVG files and then the programme freezes.
I’ve also connected to line us and the text foes green but when I press ‘p’ nothing happens and it freezes.
I’ve tried different addresses such as ‘line-us.local’, and ‘192.168.4.1’.

I’d really appreciate your help with this

Hi jawgtf,
the SVG Plotter is far from perfect.
Please try to optimize the SVG before importing. Maybe my iterator does not interpret all layers and transforms perfectly.
You could merge layers and elements to a single one. And you could export it with merged transforms.

And please check if you are able to draw the drawing that’s there on startup (Venn diagram).

Greetings,
Michael

Hi. If you’re able to send me an example svg file I can try it here to try to narrow down the problem. I think you should be able to attach it to a post but I’d not then you can email to help@line-us.com

Thanks @emnullfuenf and @rob.

Unfortunately the Venn digram image did not work either which is why I was confused. But still hoping to persevere!

@rob I’ll send you an e-mail with the sag I’m trying to work with.

@emnullfuenf if you had any further tips on how to get the Venn diagram working that would be great!

Thank you both for your responses

Thanks - I’ll let you know whether it draws ok for me. One other question, are you running in Mac or windows? On windows you may need to install Bonjour. You can download it from Apple (its confusingly called Bonjour print services) https://support.apple.com/kb/DL999?viewlocale=en_GB&locale=en_GB

Hi @rob, thanks for your help.

I’m using Mac
Mac OS Sierra 10.12.6

Let me know how it goes

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If the Venn diagram doesn’t plot the main problem could be the connection or the OS.

Is the Line-us application working on this computer? Is the Line-us application closed?
And how is the drawbot connected? Via wifi network (blue LED) oder direct connection (red LED)?

Are you using the SVG-Plotter application or are you working in Processing?

Thanks for sending the example through. It looks like opening the SVG in Illustrator and doing a Save As… gives you a file that the SVG plotter can load. I’ll send you back the file so you can see if you can send it to your Line-us. It does draw quite slowly so you might want to reduce the number of points in the SVG Plotter (press l to show then and then click and drag the mouse moving up and down to decrease/increase).

What package did you create the SVG in? I’ve looked at the two SVG files and they are different - I’d have to dig a bit more into the SVG format to understand what the difference is but if you can let me know the package you used I can maybe try to create a simpler path to look at and see whether it can produce something that the plotter can read directly.

In the meantime though if you have some files you need converted then you’re welcome to send them over to me and I can just load/save in Illustrator for you if you don’t have it.

Not sure whether we have any SVG experts on the forum, but it looks like the SVG Plotter is having trouble with this a24.55,24.55,0,0,0,3.71,4.17,68.31,68.31,0,0,0,6.31,4.78,12.75,12.75,0,0,0,5.14,2.1 in a which seems to be three arc commands but concatenated (each arc command should have seven parameters so the a for the second and third arcs is omitted). If you put the two missing
a in the SVG plotter is happy. Most things that read SVG seem ok with the syntax without though so just wondering whether anyone know whether it’s valid…?

Sorry to keep replying to myself, but probably should have looked at the spec before asking! It is valid:

https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/paths.html#Introduction

A command letter may be eliminated if an identical command letter would otherwise precede it; for instance, the following contains an unnecessary second “L” command:

M 100 200 L 200 100 L -100 -200
It may be expressed more compactly as:
M 100 200 L 200 100 -100 -200

I’ll have a look at it tomorrow. The plotter is based on the Geomerative library for Processing. I’ll test the SVG.

That’s fantastic - let me know if there’s anything I can help with.

I’ve included two examples below - the first has the a repeated and the second uses the compact syntax (you should be able to right click to download).

RepeatedCommandExample
IdenticalCommandExample

Hi @rob, not sure if this is of any help but in trying to work through the various bugs, putting in error checking and updating for Processing 3 I’ve forked the repo.

I’ve made one opinionated change by adding some basic UI elements using Interfacia

Cheers,

Tom