# Praised be hackability

**URL:** <https://forum.line-us.com/t/praised-be-hackability/493>\
**Category:** Programming and API\
**Created:** [November 22, 2019, 7:40am UTC](https://forum.line-us.com/t/praised-be-hackability/493 "2019-11-22T07:40:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![heyarne](https://forum.line-us.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/bc79bd/32.png) [@heyarne](https://forum.line-us.com/u/heyarne)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2019, 7:40am UTC](https://forum.line-us.com/t/praised-be-hackability/493/1 "2019-11-22T07:40:56Z")

</div>

I just wanted to say thank you for making the line-us so hackable. Thanks to this (and thanks to quite good docs [on Github](https://github.com/Line-us/Line-us-Programming/)) I’m able to do quite a lot with it and play around even though I’m using Linux which is officially not supported.

Just yesterday I was looking to plot maps from OpenStreetMap data end I ended up with an SVG after a seemingly endless chain of pipes and filters. I repositioned that in Inkscape (the official Line-us-plugin didn’t work by the way, it wouldn’t show up under extenstions), converted that to gcode using [this command line tool](https://github.com/technologiestiftung/svgcode), cleaned it up a bit with a `sed`-oneliner (the tool returns `G1` instead of `G01` and `G0` instead of `G00` so Line-us doesn’t understand it) and I could then send the result to Line-us via good old netcat: `netcat line-us.lan 1337 < cleaned-up.gc`.

That’s very cool! Also `telnet line-us.lan 1337` works and gives me an interactive shell to control a robot drawing arm, how cool is that? This could probably be very useful in a teaching context, too, illustrating basic networking concepts as the protocol is very simple. So yeah, thanks for building this up from simple, well-documented parts. 🙂

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rob](https://forum.line-us.com/user_avatar/forum.line-us.com/rob/32/8_2.png) [@rob](https://forum.line-us.com/u/rob)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2019, 10:49am UTC](https://forum.line-us.com/t/praised-be-hackability/493/2 "2019-11-22T10:49:43Z")

</div>

That’s so nice of you to say! Really appreciate you taking the time to let us know, and great that you’re having fun with your Line-us. Would love to see what you’ve done with OSM!

I’ll have a look at the Inkscape plugin when I get a moment, but there’s also a standalone [SVG plotter developed by Michael Zöllner](https://github.com/Line-us/Line-us-Programming#simple-svg-plotter-by-michael-z%C3%B6llner) that is worth a look. Still, the command line tool is useful - I used one a while back and it may have been the same one. I’m just finalising firmware 3.2.0 and have modified the GCode parser to accept G1 as well as G01 so you’ll be able to cut out one step - it’s just in final testing but if you’d like to give it a try let me know your machine serial number and I’ll add you to the testers list (others welcome too!). There are quite a few new GCodes in 3.2.0 - the [documentation](https://github.com/Line-us/Line-us-Programming/blob/develop/Documentation/GCodeSpec.md) is a work in progress and I’ll add some documentation on the Websockets API also so lots of good stuff to come!

Good to hear you’re poking around with telnet! I do think it helps de-mystify things as you say and GCode has turned out to be a good choice for the control language I think as it’s so simple. Just one other little bit of info, Line-us runs a web-server so you can get some info on your machine [http://line-us.local](http://line-us.local) - sometimes that can be useful!

Thanks again for the feedback! …rob