Pledge: Vinyl

From London Hackspace Wiki
Revision as of 13:41, 19 August 2010 by Artag (talk | contribs)
Roland (Large).jpg

Model is a Roland CAMM-1 PNC-950. It hold 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.

Manual: http://www.signcutpro.com/files/man/roland/pnc950.pdf

FAQ: http://support.rolanddga.com/Docs/Documents/departments/Product%20Management/Product%20Information/Specialty%20Products/PNC950_FAQ.pdf


The cutter has been donated by Tomwardill, with a small stock of vinyl. However, we will need more and Tom would appreciate donations towards the cost of his larger stocks. Please indicate if you can help.

Operation

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)

  • 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.
  • 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.

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;

Pledges

Running total: £40

Approximate target: £???

Total paid-up: £0