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Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

This is great! I just created a pen holding adapter for my 3d printer so I can do some plots. I still need to find a good way to efficiently convert SVG files to gcode, but this will be a good start.

Inkscape has a gcode generation tool, but it requires some tweaks to work on my prusa 3d printer. Still a work in progress!

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It's just a list of X, Y coordinates...

An untested python one-liner:

    '\n'.join(["G0 X"+x+" Y"+y for x,y in coords])

Grab the code for homing and stuff from the start of another gcode file that works.

Svg is typically a lot more complicated than coordinate points... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorial/Pa...

(In the context of this post, which is just straight lines)

If you can use an editor like Inkscape to flatten the image (by recursively ungrouping until every path is under the top-level <svg> tag), you should have a bunch of paths that share a coordinate space. There are pathological cases like images that use CSS for positioning, but for most cases this will work.

Then you can use something like svgpathtools (https://github.com/mathandy/svgpathtools) in Python to loop over the paths and get the coordinates.

In case it's useful, I have an example svg to gcode converter here: https://github.com/paulgb/penkit/blob/master/penkit/polargra...

It is for driving a polargraph-style plotter, so it includes a coordinate transform that GP does not need to do.

Yes, in this case the SVG is a list of coordinate pairs, should be fairly easy to extract.

https://github.com/javierbyte/pintr/blob/master/lib/svg.js#L...

* Update to add a link to the code that generates the SVG.

Curves can be a bit more complicated, plus generating the tool lift and moves! I also need to factor in scaling the drawing as well, plus speeds.

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