In preparation for some hacking on the Student Robotics motor feedback, I’ve written a script for generating PDFs containing rotary encoder patterns. I wrote a utility that used cairo in C a while back. I thought I’d try out pycairo. It was pretty much the same experience. I’ve put it up on gitorious. Run it like this:

% git clone git://gitorious.org/rotenc/rotenc.git
% cd rotenc
% ./rotenc
Usage: rotenc INNER_DIAMETER OUTER_DIAMETER N_SEG OUT_FILE
Where: 
	INNER_DIAMETER is the diameter of the inner circle in millimetres.
	OUTER_DIAMETER is the diameter of the outer circle in millimetres.
	N_SEG is the number of segments to draw
	OUT_FILE is the name of the pdf file to write to.
% ./rotenc 50 60 16 encoder.pdf
%

Update:I thought I’d experiment with Thingiverse, and upload it there.

Tags: cairo, feedback, hacking, rotary encoder, student robotics