gDraw is a 2D G-Code drawing program written in Processing 3. You can make a drawing with it and print this drawing as a line out of plastic with a 3D printer (currently, it supports only Ultimaker G-Code flavor and is only tested on an Ultimaker2). Read more about it on my website: http://www.niklasroy.com/articles/194/gdraw-free-software-for-you
How to use:
You can draw in two modes, the free mode and the fixed mode. “Free” is nice for organic drawings, “fixed” is good for geometric drawings, as it creates always straight lines in a metric grid. You can toggle between the two modes either by pushing the button “F” on your keyboard or by hitting the free/fixed button in the menu on the left.
You can zoom in and out of the canvas with the mouse wheel.
Interrupt the line by hitting the space bar. The program displays the path of the printhead, when it just moves but does not print, as a thin line. Because the printhead might still squeeze out small amounts of plastic during those paths and therefore you might want to keep control over where the printhead moves exactly.
You can save drawings by hitting the save button and you can load them again by hitting the load button. As the current drawing will not be deleted when you load a path, you can merge drawings by loading one drawing after another.
Finally, in order to create printable G-Code, you hit the “save G-Code”-button. You have to give your file the extension “.gcode” otherwise your printer might not recognize it as a valid G-Code file.
How it works:
G-Code is the “language” that a 3D printer understands. It is a text file, with a list of coordinates for X, Y and Z axis, and also for E (the extrusion motor). The printer reads this file, moves from coordinate to coordinate and squeezes out plastic as indicated in the value for E.
gDraw is a simple vector drawing program that turns your drawings into G-Code so you can print your drawings as lines of plastic.
Disclaimer:
I have an Ultimaker 2, so I wrote the program in such way that it works with my printer. If you have a different printer, you might have to adapt the G-Code header in order to make it work for you. Have a look in the lines 486-511 of my code. This is where the G-Code header for the Ultimaker 2 is written.