Equipment/VinylCutterOld

Status

I have had a certain amount of success running the cutter with a serial connection from Inkscape under Linux. More messing around is needed.--Artag 13:32, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Model

• Roland CAMM-1 PNC-950. PDF manual, FAQ.

Specifications

• It holds up to 610mm (24") media and cuts up to 584mm ( ~23").
• Length is essentially unlimited as it can use roll-feed media but seems to be restricted to 25m.

Instructions

Quick setup guide

• Set inkscape to hpgl output
• draw figure and print to a file
• set serial port to 9600 8n1, crtscts.
• connect blue cable (a 9-pin gender-changer is needed at the PC end)
• load vinyl, switch cutter on. cutter should park at right hand side
• press Setup, cutter parks at left. Move cutter if necessary with cursor buttons, press Origin Set to mark lower right corner of drawing
• cat the inkscape output file to the serial port

It should be possible to enable the serial port as a printer and print direct to it, but I found this produced cutter errors (flashing power light) and no cut.

The following file was generated by inkskape for a star shape. This almost works : the first leg is replaced by a poorly cut arc. May imply a need for some sort of initialisation data.

IN;
SP1;
PU3999,6429;
PD2693,5186;
PD929,5557;
PD1707,3932;
PD809,2369;
PD2596,2606;
PD3805,1269;
PD4131,3042;
PD5776,3778;
PD4191,4636;
PD3999,6429;
PD3999,6429;

Tips

• Sometimes the cutter refuses to print or respond to any buttons. This hasn't happened since I opened a door in the bottom of the printer and poked an EPROM there, so may be due to some poor internal connection.

Serial cable

The serial cable (blue, with a 25WD at one end and a 9WD at the other) is connected as follows :

Cutter, 25 pin male D	PC, 9 pin female D	Use
pin 2	pin 2	PC RXD from cutter
3	3	PC TXD to cutter
4	n/c	cutter pin 5, RTS CTS loopback
5	n/c	cutter pin 4, RTS CTS loopback
7	5	ground
20	8	cutter DTR to PC CTS, flowcontrol

This provides for hardware (rts/cts) handshake. Software flowcontrol may be OK but the cutter manual suggests overrun may occur.

Consumables

There is a pledge running for the purchase of more vinyl.

Example code

require "rubygems"
require "serialport"

if (!ARGV[0])
	puts "Yo dawg, I need a file."
	exit
end

plotter = SerialPort.new("/dev/ttyUSB2")
plotter.baud=(9600)
plotter.flow_control=(SerialPort::HARD)
plotter.rts=(1)
plotter.data_bits=(8)
plotter.stop_bits=(1)

begin
        File.open(ARGV[0], "r") do |inFile|
                while (line = inFile.gets)
                        puts line
                        plotter.write(line)
                        # sleep(1)
                end
        end
rescue
        puts "Failed to open #{ARGV[0]}"
        exit
end