Assistance request: plotter

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Tom Servaes

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Nov 28, 2017, 4:06:55 AM11/28/17
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Hi all,

I've volunteered (long ago) to get our plotter back up and running. I've finally managed to collect all the attributes and will be starting on the "figuring out" phase soon. If you're interested to help out or have some great resources, please contact me directly.

We've received a free license for professional plotter drivers and the plotter can also accepts HP-GL files (precursor and competitor to PostScript). This would be a major tool for many projects, so in the interest of time I'm getting started and welcome anyone to join during the process.

Cheers,
Tom

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Tom Servaes

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Chris McDonald

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Nov 28, 2017, 7:55:39 AM11/28/17
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Hello Tom,

I had it up and running a few years ago. There is a HP-GL plugin for inkscape that will generate a file which you can feed to the plotter over a serial connection. I think I was just using minicom to send the HP-GL files. 

It was a bit of a clunky arrangement but it got the job done. 

There wasn't many working pens left for the machine at that point. I don't know what the availability of new pens for that machine is. 

Chris McDonld

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Tom Servaes

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Nov 28, 2017, 11:16:57 AM11/28/17
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That's great information, Chris. Thanks! I will send you questions as I go, or you could come by and show me if you want.

Yes, we have been wondering about pens. I'm hoping there is an online source for them, or Deserres on Barrington might know where to get them.

Tom

Evan d'Entremont

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Jan 8, 2018, 12:37:50 PM1/8/18
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Any luck? I have a feeling you could print a pen holder that uses the inserts for fancy pens. The serial comms on that were a giant pain in the ass I forget what the problem was though. 
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Andrew Crawford

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Jan 9, 2018, 11:46:22 AM1/9/18
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I did some work on the plotter. Serial communications is working OK. I was able to control the plotter from a laptop using basic GL commands and draw shapes etc.

There are two outstanding problems:

* The plotter really likes German. There is an option to change the language to English (hold down a key on startup) but when it works, the setting isn't retained, and it mostly doesn't work at all. Luckily German isn't too hard to understand...

* I wasn't able to get a working Windows printer driver for it. There is a commercial driver that I tried (very expensive) but even it didn't work. I'm pretty sure this is mostly about finding the correct driver, and it may well be that using Linux or even an older version of Windows might be more helpful.

Andrew Crawford

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Jan 9, 2018, 12:00:23 PM1/9/18
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Looks like Inkscape on Linux should talk to this quite happily.

Shawn Wilson

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Jan 9, 2018, 1:17:45 PM1/9/18
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Was the expensive printer driver you tried WINLine?

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 1:00 PM Andrew Crawford <acra...@laetabilis.com> wrote:
Looks like Inkscape on Linux should talk to this quite happily.

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