Fighting with computers

I have a project where I need to draw some text on a plotter and while I could just use a vectorized Truetype font, that usually comes with the undesired effect of doubling the printing time plus leaving a white background, as the font strokes are made of two different lines. A stick font consists of a single line. Just googling around I found this program . That happens to include a set of font files that were easy to parse (as they were text files).  This is the font I selected for my purposes: Originally it did not include the full set of Spanish characters but that was easy to fix , as you can already see them on the picture above. Plus I realized some of the existing characters could be optimized so drawing time could be reduced.  Maybe there is a better way as I have a very limited knowledge about font standards. But this approach makes sense to me. Now I just need to create a simple script to go from text to SVG or G-CODE.  Update : I just put my code whe

While there are different solutions to achieve weight measuring, it seems the cheapest and neatest way is to use the HX711 amplifier and A/D converter. Of course, a test weight is needed for you to be able to set the scale right. In my case that is going to be done by that idler that totals 11.30 grams. My sample load cell is a 100 grams unit so it is not that bad, but for a larger end scale, you want to have a test weight at least 10% of end of scale value. What HX711 does is two things, on one hand, it is a precision low-noise amplifier for the load cell signal and on the other hand, it performs a 24-bit analog to digital conversion (much higher resolution than the 10-bit resolution of the Arduino built-in analog inputs). Once data is converted to digital format, Arduino can read it from the HX711 using a two-wire serial interface. It basically streams the 24-bit value on one pin while the other provides the clock signal for the transfer. There are several Arduino librarie