Page 186 - Robot Builder's Bonanza

MAKING DRILLING AND CUTTING LAYOUTS 155

You might already have a vector graphics program handy— even Microsoft Word comes
with vector drawing tools. But there are plenty of free and open- source vector graphics appli-
cations you can try, and some are better suited for robot building. These include Inkscape,
which has become something of an industry standard, and Google Sketch (available free or
paid; the free version is good enough for most tasks.)

Using Inkscape for Robot Design
Inkscape serves as a good reference for using a vector graphics program to design robots.
Figure 15-3 shows the Inkscape program window. Here’s a rundown of the important parts
of the program interface.

Menu bar and tool bars: These control the program using commands in menus and on
various toolbars.
Canvas: Your drawing goes in the middle portion, the canvas. Zoom controls let you see
your drawing from a distance or up close.
Drawing tools: You create or edit the drawing using this small selection of tools on the left
side of the screen. Vector graphics programs like Inkscape are based on what’s known
as Bezier curves, whereby any shape is composed of one or more lines. Each line can
be bent into sharp or smooth curves— a circle is really a line that bends back to itself.
Color palette: Solid shapes and their lines can be filled with color using a handy palette of
preset shades, located at the bottom of the screen. Millions of other colors can be set
using specialized tools.

G Inkscape also supports writing text on your drawings. Use the text tool to label parts or provide
dimensions. Inkscape lacks features for automatically inserting dimensions (this is more the
domain of a CAD program; see the next section), but you can readily add the text yourself.

Figure 15-4 shows a drill and cutting layout created in Inkscape using just simple shapes.
A circle is used to define the shape of the robot’s base, and rectangles indicate cutouts for

Figure 15-3 Inkscape (available for Windows,
Macintosh, and Linux) is free software for creating and Figure 15-4 The cutting and drill
printing vector graphics. Its interface is simple and easy template shown in Figure 15-1 created by
to learn. Inkscape and then printed to scale.

15-chapter-15.indd 155 4/21/11 11:48 AM