So, as it stands my research has kind of hit a bottleneck in that, for now the hardware side of thing has hit the snag of not having a readily accessible 3d printer on which to print and iterate on designs rapidly, so rather than losing momentum I've decided to take a skim at what is available for mission planning. 

Anyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s in the UK will remember the venerable RM Nimbus running the RM version of the classic programming language Logo. (Perhaps this is where the shape of the turtle subconsciously appeared from when thinking of a friendly shaped line drawing animal?) In the programming language Logo, you were given a turtle shaped animal and a very basic set of commands which commanded the turtle to move in any direction you chose. 

Shoot forward to today, where the likes of the Nimbus are now museum pieces and we have hardware that are magnitudes more powerful for a fraction of the cost and size, hence why we are able to do projects like this. 

What I am after is a something that offers similar abilities to logo in that, it needs the minimal of knowledge to accomplish a lot. Examples are out there such as Python Sandbox's turtle mode where a set of very basic commands are able to make basic shapes. But beyond this, how do we go about translating pictures into cartesian coordinates that a robot knows to draw? My research has led me to this pipeline which seems to offer the highest fun to labour ratio for now, given my limited set of skills. 

Additionally, it then begins the conversation of manual control and how this will be accomplished, but one thing at a time I guess.