How to draw a rectangle in Gcode
So you’ve played with the Makelangelo‘s generated Gcode and now you want to experiment on your own. Cool! Here’s a simple rectangle to get you started.
Now let’s give some values to these parameters:
| A | 20 |
| B | 40 |
| C | 10 |
| D | 30 |
My method is to lift the pen, drive to a corner, put the pen down, and then trace the rectangle. That means going to five points because we have to come back to the start.
G0 Z90; # pen up G0 X-10 Y20; # p1 G0 Z40; # pen down G0 X30 Y20; # p2 G0 X30 Y-40; # p3 G0 X-10 Y-40; # p4 G0 X-10 Y20; # p1 again G0 Z90; # pen up
And voila! I’ve deliberately done this with the origin away from the center so the numbers are more obvious. I hope you see that in a cartesian system the origin could be anywhere. For example, if it were below and to the left of P4 all the X and Y values would be positive.
