taxi
taxi is an opinionated Axidraw GUI. Here are a few things taxi feels strongly about:
- The Axidraw is the best plotter. taxi works ony with the Axidraw, and that's where the axi part of its name comes from.
- Your main computer is best used for creating artwork. Let a Raspberry Pi run the plotter.
- After experimenting with a classical GUI which wouldn't fit on small screens, a frankenstein CLI with remote capabilities, and an outright crazy TUI-MIDI-controller hybrid, the now-obvious path forward is a touch-screen-based interface (thus the t in the name – also saxi was already taken).
- taxi doesn't handle the scaling, layout, optimisation, and previsualisation of your SVGs, because your workflow should. Use vpype and/or vsketch if it doesn't.
- taxi is not web-based (it's based on Kivy and runs locally). This choice may or may not be rational.
Features
- Touch-screen-based UI
- Easy controls for pen up/down position setup
- First-class support of multi-pen plots
- End-of-plot notification support (currently through Home Assistant only)
Installation
Note: these instructions assumes a Rasberry Pi 4 with Raspbian. YMMV if your setup differs.
A number of dependencies must be installed:
$ sudo apt-get install python3.9 python3-dev python3-shapely python3-pil python3-numpy python3-scipy python3-serial python3-pygame libsdl2-dev
Using a virtual environment is mandatory BUT using system packages makes the installation easier. Don't even try to skip this step:
$ python3 -m venv taxi-venv --system-site-packages
Activate the virtual environment (this must be done for each new terminal session):
$ source taxi-venv/bin/activate
Install taxi:
$ pip install git+https://github.com/plottertools/taxi#egg=taxi
License
See LICENSE