After a bit of work and help from fellow Hackerspace members, we managed to figure out how to talk to the Cricut. Check out the I started for more details on the protocol and check out the project on GitHub if you want to start writing your own control software. Libcutter's goal is to be a nice cross platform library for controlling the Cricut and potentially other similar devices. Right now all our experimentation has been with Cricut personals at firmware revision 1.34, but I'm hoping it'll work with other models as well. I coded up a quick Python demo script that's a Logo interpreter for the Cricut that's included with libcutter. Here's a quick video of it in action:
I've also got a quick Windows only Python module implementation that you can use to control the Cricut as well. To get everything up and running, you'll need to get and installed and grab nice Python XXTEA implementation. After that, just download the Cricut protocol and the Logo demo and you should be ready to draw (or cut) your favorite Hackerspace logo, or perhaps a hole bunch of circles:
You can of course write your own control programs to do other equally useless but still fun things:
