For Thing-A-Day 2011 I'm doing a 1D (writing) vs 2D (visual design) vs 3D (3D modeling) Throwdown!TAD D1 I completed a chapter of a novella that emerged from an observation about an inchworm. Hmmm, inchworms are interesting....That night, I checked on Thingiverse -- there were no caterpillars yet! (Snakes, and Snakestas, yes.) So for D2 I cycled from "1D" (prose writing) to "2D" (drawing) and sketched out this caterpillar based on a bunch of photo references. Additional challenge -- to make this drawing fit for the MakerBot Unicorn (so path-only, no fill shading) and force myself to use my clunky old Wacom tablet instead of resorting to a mouse (which is typically what I do).Now, that I can focus on doing lots of Unicorn illustrations this month is thanks to the incredible work Marty has done to take Scribbles (from Hoeken) and the Eggbot tools -- and create an Inkscape-to-Gcode tool that allows me to skip at least five painful steps of processing. As a bonus, as I stuck with scribbling this whole thing out within Inkscape and didn't have pstoedit or similar to erase the history of my drawing, this item plots in the order of strokes that I created. So if you print this thing you will be watching me draw it, only via a robot.Tomorrow for D3 I will be cycling forward to "3D" (3D modeling) and will either attempt to create an elaborate 3Dtin model that is awesome and beautiful, or jump into Sketchup, Alibre, or OpenSCAD to bring more caterpillars to Thingiverse.Step One: Grab Marty's tools for Inkscape here: https://github.com/martymcguireNow you can take my SVG file or your SVG file and process the file using Marty's excellent menu options for how you want to Home the drawing, whether you want a registration mark, etc..Step Two: Grab the gcode here and load it into your bot. Move the pen to about 10mm above over the front left corner of the printing surface, about 1mm in on x and y axis so that you can see the registration mark. (I restricted the drawing to 75mm x 75mm so sticky notes will work just fine.)Step Three: Hit "Build" and watch the pen touch down onto the surface of the paper. Is the registration good? Bad? Light? Too dark? The drives are disengaged so you can adjust the z-axis and hit "No" so you can re-run the script and watch the registration mark again.Step Four: Hit "Yes" and watch the drawing unfold in the order of strokes I drew it.Step Five: Retrieve your print!Step Six: Print again!