#PenPlotter maintenance today. My HP 7585B stopped responding over RS-232. Diagnostics revealed a problem with the interface card. Luckily I have a spare machine that can donate a new working card!
And it works! Here’s a video of the HP 7585B #PenPlotter plotting a big arc Truchet tile design using three colors (yellow, cyan, and magenta) on 11x15 watercolor. Total time 1h15m.
Video montage of a HP 7585 #PenPlotter plotting a design of large concentric arcs broken up by squares in cyan, yellow, and magenta. It performs tool changes to swap pens automatically.
Realized that the OpenGL library I'm using looks up the size of the elements in the array for every access when writing to a vertex attribute array. Wrote my own version of this that caches the size and now my renderer is cooking (I have a large vertex attribute array that I use for instancing).
This is definitely good enough for me for now, as I'm now drawing millions of entities per second, which is Just Fine™️ for 2D rendering. 🔥
One of the things I did today during the #CreativeCode Jam in Berlin was to visualize some agents (2D points) @mimetik 's program generated on real time.
His program is fascinating to watch... how they cluster, chase each other, try to escape...
I thought the point distribution in 2D space was more interesting than just a random distribution and wondered how they might look as triangles.
6 agent types with different colors. It was fun to juggle with that data and create many iterations.