I might be able to offer a little bit of help here. I have spent quite a bit if time trying to figure out how to reverse engineer different ports and buses. There is a program found here:

http://benoit.papillault.free.fr/usbsnoop/

that can log USB communication. We could use this to write our own cutter control program.

I would love to be a part of this but I feel that I am already letting people down by not following through on promises. I am quite overloaded right now and I can't do it alone. If others want to work on this too I would love to be a part of it.

I also want to help write a scaling widget for the DXF export option. I just have not had time to tackle it.

-Patrick

bulia byak wrote:

...forwarding this to the devel list...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Pam B. <pamely@...329...> Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 2:26 PM Subject: Programming for Inkscape. To: buliabyak@...400...

Hi, I have been told to contact you by Bibi Morris. I understand that in the past some wonderful people have made changes in Inkscape that made it an incredibly useful program for owners of Wishblade and CraftRobo personal media cutters.

I have now been provided a tip that would allow users of Linux to drive their machines directly from Inkscape. The "tip" suggested that Windows users might be able to do the same if someone was able to do something with the windows binary for Inkscape. As is probably already obvious, I know nothing about Operating Systems, nor do I know anything about coding and software programming.

Actually, I no longer even own a Wishblade, (I have moved on to a bigger machine.) but I do run a support group for over 1,000 personal cutter owners. This has the potential of being a very powerful tool to owners of these types of cutters and could save them hundreds of dollars in software upgrades. Would you please check into this and see if it is something that can be done for us?

Thank you, Pam Beard and the 1,000+ in the yahoo group: EasyWishbladers

The "tip" is pasted below:

If the words Linux, RedHat, Debian, Inkscape and / or Python mean
anything to you read on (warning, getting technical here...).
How would you like to cut from inkscape? all in Linux?

I have been lurking in Linux Printer Driver land and was very happy
to find an early copy of a Python script designed to provide the
necessary "linkage" between Inkscape and a craftrobo cutter. With a
little change to the code, we verified it works with a wishblade as
well. But you might have to wait until there is support in the down
loadable python script.

Basically, you print from Inkscape "using PostScript operators" (not
as a bitmap). And, instead of sending the output to a printer, you
"pipe" it to the python application. This operation is actually
described in the Inkscape print popup menu. When you click on print,
the python GUI pops up giving you more options. This GUI interface
is *much* simpler than the actual graphtec software. Most anything
to do with the image needs to be done in Inkscape. The only real
control on the GUI are the paper size, the cutting speed and the
cutting pressure.

I suppose this can also be done in windows. My *assumptions* are
that there is a windows binary for inkscape as well as python and
python related software. If that's the case, then you may be able to
skip setting up a Linux box.

I know I am hitting only about 1% of you, but if you want to try the
script you can get it here: http://vidar.gimp.org/graphtecprint/
....I am sure feed back at this stage of development would influence
what features are fixed, enhanced and / or added.

Hi Patrick,

Understood about the commitments issue... Perhaps if you could simply outline the approach to take in a blueprint (blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape), then someone interested in learning how to do this sort of work could pick it up from there?

Bryce

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 03:30:05PM -0500, Patrick wrote:

I might be able to offer a little bit of help here. I have spent quite a bit if time trying to figure out how to reverse engineer different ports and buses. There is a program found here:

http://benoit.papillault.free.fr/usbsnoop/

that can log USB communication. We could use this to write our own cutter control program.

I would love to be a part of this but I feel that I am already letting people down by not following through on promises. I am quite overloaded right now and I can't do it alone. If others want to work on this too I would love to be a part of it.

I also want to help write a scaling widget for the DXF export option. I just have not had time to tackle it.

-Patrick

bulia byak wrote:

...

...forwarding this to the devel list...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Pam B. <pamely@...329...> Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 2:26 PM Subject: Programming for Inkscape. To: buliabyak@...400...

Hi, I have been told to contact you by Bibi Morris. I understand that in the past some wonderful people have made changes in Inkscape that made it an incredibly useful program for owners of Wishblade and CraftRobo personal media cutters.

I have now been provided a tip that would allow users of Linux to drive their machines directly from Inkscape. The "tip" suggested that Windows users might be able to do the same if someone was able to do something with the windows binary for Inkscape. As is probably already obvious, I know nothing about Operating Systems, nor do I know anything about coding and software programming.

Actually, I no longer even own a Wishblade, (I have moved on to a bigger machine.) but I do run a support group for over 1,000 personal cutter owners. This has the potential of being a very powerful tool to owners of these types of cutters and could save them hundreds of dollars in software upgrades. Would you please check into this and see if it is something that can be done for us?

Thank you, Pam Beard and the 1,000+ in the yahoo group: EasyWishbladers

The "tip" is pasted below:

If the words Linux, RedHat, Debian, Inkscape and / or Python mean
anything to you read on (warning, getting technical here...).
How would you like to cut from inkscape? all in Linux?

I have been lurking in Linux Printer Driver land and was very happy
to find an early copy of a Python script designed to provide the
necessary "linkage" between Inkscape and a craftrobo cutter. With a
little change to the code, we verified it works with a wishblade as
well. But you might have to wait until there is support in the down
loadable python script.

Basically, you print from Inkscape "using PostScript operators" (not
as a bitmap). And, instead of sending the output to a printer, you
"pipe" it to the python application. This operation is actually
described in the Inkscape print popup menu. When you click on print,
the python GUI pops up giving you more options. This GUI interface
is *much* simpler than the actual graphtec software. Most anything
to do with the image needs to be done in Inkscape. The only real
control on the GUI are the paper size, the cutting speed and the
cutting pressure.

I suppose this can also be done in windows. My *assumptions* are
that there is a windows binary for inkscape as well as python and
python related software. If that's the case, then you may be able to
skip setting up a Linux box.

I know I am hitting only about 1% of you, but if you want to try the
script you can get it here: http://vidar.gimp.org/graphtecprint/
....I am sure feed back at this stage of development would influence
what features are fixed, enhanced and / or added.

Interesting!...

I believe Pam copied my posting from the wishblade group (original "tip" in this thread). No one followed me up there - I think. (Yahoo groups & e-mail are difficult to use w/the large (enormous!) amount of traffic the wishblade group produces.) So I never checked back, thinking this to be a bit beyond the group.

I'm not sure where you guys (Bryce, Tom & Patrick) are headed. I got to think, inkscape developers are not going to be interested in embedding specialized support (print drivers) into the application. I think Vidars solution (link is in original "tip" below) works great. But I have not heard from Vidar for months (hope everything is all right) and his Python script does not support the wishblade machine.

However, a simple fix (patch) and you can be off plotting (cutting) from inkscape -> Vidar's patched python script -> wishblade.

Which is all great for me (I love this setup). But how many people are going to have the knowhow to install a Python interpreter and Glade graphic libraries in order to support the GUI that pops up when you hit print from the inkscape menus (after you configured inkscape according to Vidar's instructions)?

I was thinking not many - but now I see the inkscape wiki catering to these type of people: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/BlueprintCutterControl

..ok, tell me where to post the patch and I'll alter the wiki accordingly.

Tom Davidson wrote:

Since this looks like it might depend on piping postscript to an external command let me point to a discussion in the bug tracker that discusses how to get this working with the new (for 0.46) GTK+ print dialog under Linux... (you may need to modify your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/189813 "no 'pipe print output to command' option by default in new gtk+ print dialog "

-Tom

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 12:43 PM, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...1798...> wrote:

...

Hi Patrick,

Understood about the commitments issue... Perhaps if you could simply outline the approach to take in a blueprint (blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape), then someone interested in learning how to do this sort of work could pick it up from there?

Bryce

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 03:30:05PM -0500, Patrick wrote:

...

I might be able to offer a little bit of help here. I have spent quite a bit if time trying to figure out how to reverse engineer different ports and buses. There is a program found here:

http://benoit.papillault.free.fr/usbsnoop/

that can log USB communication. We could use this to write our own cutter control program.

I would love to be a part of this but I feel that I am already letting people down by not following through on promises. I am quite overloaded right now and I can't do it alone. If others want to work on this too I would love to be a part of it.

I also want to help write a scaling widget for the DXF export option. I just have not had time to tackle it.

-Patrick

bulia byak wrote:

...

...forwarding this to the devel list...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Pam B. <pamely@...329...> Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 2:26 PM Subject: Programming for Inkscape. To: buliabyak@...400...

Hi, I have been told to contact you by Bibi Morris. I understand that in the past some wonderful people have made changes in Inkscape that made it an incredibly useful program for owners of Wishblade and CraftRobo personal media cutters.

I have now been provided a tip that would allow users of Linux to drive their machines directly from Inkscape. The "tip" suggested that Windows users might be able to do the same if someone was able to do something with the windows binary for Inkscape. As is probably already obvious, I know nothing about Operating Systems, nor do I know anything about coding and software programming.

Actually, I no longer even own a Wishblade, (I have moved on to a bigger machine.) but I do run a support group for over 1,000 personal cutter owners. This has the potential of being a very powerful tool to owners of these types of cutters and could save them hundreds of dollars in software upgrades. Would you please check into this and see if it is something that can be done for us?

Thank you, Pam Beard and the 1,000+ in the yahoo group: EasyWishbladers

The "tip" is pasted below:

If the words Linux, RedHat, Debian, Inkscape and / or Python mean
anything to you read on (warning, getting technical here...).
How would you like to cut from inkscape? all in Linux?

I have been lurking in Linux Printer Driver land and was very happy
to find an early copy of a Python script designed to provide the
necessary "linkage" between Inkscape and a craftrobo cutter. With a
little change to the code, we verified it works with a wishblade as
well. But you might have to wait until there is support in the down
loadable python script.

Basically, you print from Inkscape "using PostScript operators" (not
as a bitmap). And, instead of sending the output to a printer, you
"pipe" it to the python application. This operation is actually
described in the Inkscape print popup menu. When you click on print,
the python GUI pops up giving you more options. This GUI interface
is *much* simpler than the actual graphtec software. Most anything
to do with the image needs to be done in Inkscape. The only real
control on the GUI are the paper size, the cutting speed and the
cutting pressure.

I suppose this can also be done in windows. My *assumptions* are
that there is a windows binary for inkscape as well as python and
python related software. If that's the case, then you may be able to
skip setting up a Linux box.

I know I am hitting only about 1% of you, but if you want to try the
script you can get it here: http://vidar.gimp.org/graphtecprint/
....I am sure feed back at this stage of development would influence
what features are fixed, enhanced and / or added.