Eggbot software release notes

New Features in v2.1.4

1. The Eggbot extensions menu in Inkscape has been reorganized. There are now two categories which appear under Inkscape's "Extension" menu: EggBot and EggBot Contributed. The core, supported Eggbot extensions remain under the EggBot category in the Extensions menu. Unsupported user-contributed extensions will appear under the EggBot Contributed category. In this release, the Eggmazing extension has been moved to that category as well as the addition of four new, unsupported extensions: Hatch fill, Post process trace bitmap, Stretch, and Twist. Although unsupported, documentation for these contributed extensions is available. Such is the power of wiki's and the communities they bring about!

2. The "Start with pen centered" option of the Eggbot Control extension has been made more intuitive. When enabled, it now means that the pen's position at the start of a plot is the center of your Inkscape drawing template (page). Namely, if the template's dimensions are W × H, then the pen is at the point (W/2, H/2). Here W and H are the template's width and height, respectively.

Issues resolved in v2.1.4 of the Inkscape Eggbot extensions

• Serial timeout possible during pen-up/pen-down (Issue 21). If the pen-up or pen-down speeds are very slow or the pen-up or pen-down delays very long, then it was possible to get a timeout error.

• An XML comment tag would cause a report of an object which must be converted to a <path> (Issue 28). While Inkscape itself does not generate XML comments, other applications might do so. These XML comments, when encountered during plotting, were generating spurious warnings, "Warning: unable to draw object, please convert it to a path first".

• On Macs running OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the Eggbot Control and Eggmazing extensions would genrate error messages about "Invalid syntax" (Issue 29).

• Change "Start with pen centered" behavior to be more intuitive (Issue 30). See New features above.

• Plotting of SVG "clones" did not work in all cases, particularly Inkscape's "cloned tiles" (Issue 32).

• Eggbot plotting ignored the SVG "viewbox" attribute (Issue 33). Drawings generated with Corel Draw, for instance, would draw as a few very tiny points.

• The Linux Eggbot extension package should not include the "eggbot_2010_10_04" parent directory (Issue 34). When unzipping the Eggbot extension package on Linux, there was an extra directory level in the unzipped result.

• After a plot was finished, the return-to-home function could needlessly rotate the egg multiple 360 degree turns (Issue 35).