notes.variogr.am
My name is Brian Whitman. I am a lapsed scientist and sound artist currently co-founder/CTO at The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company in Somerville, MA. As I work on various scaling and media search problems with detours into art projects I'll be posting details here in the hopes that I can learn from others. I'd always like to hear from you if you are working on similar things.
Dec 31st, 2008 @ 1:34 pm
Plotters & Serial Adapters
Got this beauty in the office:
200 pound freight, the guy wouldn’t even carry it up our stairs. I had to standing-kick the pallet support beams and tear the thing apart in our lobby. Thankfully it was a holiday and not a lot of people were around. The plotter itself is not so heavy, but came with a a beautiful rolling stand and a lot of pens. The previous owner seemed to have a vellum fetish (don’t we all) and most of the pens are special vellum-writing ones.
Doug-e hooked me up with the way-alpha Chiplotle that him and Victor Adan are cooking up. It’s a python library that wraps pyserial and can send HP-GL commands to any connected plotter. Of course, that required a disgusting detour down save-us-from-ourselves debian style firmware wrangling as my NC10 does not have a serial port. Keywords for future use: ihex2fw. HP cables are deliciously strange, and even their website is sort of wrong about it, but I‘m working on getting an old 25pin->9pin wrapped the right way
