About vanilla.penplotter
I wanted to try drawing on my iDraw with JavaScript, and to see the pen’s route before starting the machine.
Why
Keeping the drawing and the plotter connection in one browser page seemed useful. The sketch supplies points and pen assignments; the engine makes a plan you can inspect before plotting.
If you draw in p5.js, p5.penplotter connects your sketch to this engine.
Me, myself and AI.
Why do I feel like I have to explain how I work with AI?
Don't we all now?
Everybody knows things changed in October 2025. No?
And why do things I create in cooperation with AI feel never finished? Like true vs false, boolean finished.
Not kind of finished.
Why do I feel this terrible unease when an AI (mostly Claude - sorry) permanently puts itself in the contributors list in Github on one of my projects, yet I worked on this with a number of tools and offered hundreds of hours for it myself.
There we are, now. Fifty fifty contributors, next to each other.
Never to go away ever again.
Am I being grumpy? I love AI!
It allows me to do things in weeks that I used to program in hours. No, I mean I gave AI a real shot very early, a coworker eager to shine, but suffering from destructive dementia.
Forgetting plans, "upgrading" long made agreements without remorse.
All that changed in October 2025.
Mostly.
What I try to do is use AI to build bridges that were not there, nor even thinkable before. Bridges with other code things, trying to hold on to what I believe still makes sense. Processing/p5.js coding may well be the best thing that happened to me, so I will not let it be taken away. I optimize processes, let it talk to strange machines, make manuals, learn and keep on coding. I believe it still opens minds of the young and stops calcification for the not so young.
But why am I still explaining myself?
I can still do all this on my own. For now. Slowly.
Last thoughts:
Work with things, be fearless, code, try things, make it break.
Eventually AI might ruin humanity, but didn't we do that on our own already?
Sebastien Vanblaere · prjcts.be
Related work
- p5.plotSvg: SVG capture for p5.js, by Golan Levin.
- p5.plotterControl: live control of GRBL pen plotters from p5.js.
- vpype: tools for processing plotter vector graphics.
- AxiDraw Python API: the reference for reliable EBB motion.
- p5.gysin and wave samplers: the sister libraries; the first exports SVG whose supported paths can be imported here, the second supplies the numbers the examples draw with.