I've been following this acquisition closely, as the new machines look great. There are some new homing features, along with upgraded servos. They appear to be in the assembly phase at the moment and are still targeting "spring".

Plotters fit so well with generative art. I highly recommend considering purchasing one! In fact, I learned about them on HN in 2018, and now using them to make art is my full time job.

I’m so glad you picked up on that! It was my goal to encourage folks to let their curiosity lead them through the experience. I was quite surprised seeing a few people sit down for 20-30 minutes straight just to use the app… my thought was the plotters would be the center of attention. Others even asked if I could release the app for them to use later, which I would love to do at some point.

Thank you! That was actually close to my first idea for this installation. I wrote some code to re-imagine a raster image as a vector, but I couldn't find a way to keep the detail while also keeping the drawing time below 10-15 minutes. That's how I arrived at the MIDI idea.

Show HN: I built an interactive plotter art exhibit for SIGGRAPH

I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.