Equipment/OldVinylCutter

From London Hackspace Wiki
Vinyl cutter
VinylCutter7.jpg
Model Unknown
Sub-category Office equipment
Status Good working order
Consumables Unknown
Accessories Unknown
Training requirement Yes
Training link See Hipster
Owner Hipster
Origin Long term loan from Hipster
Maintainers Hipster

Training

Training is run by Velyks on Fridays, notices of training sessions will be put on the mailing list. Training schedule can be found here

Data

== TRAINING NEEDED BEFORE USE ==

  • Max. Cutting Width: 610mm
  • Cutting Speed: 10-800mm/s
  • Cutting Force: 10g-500g
  • Page with more info
  • Setup info

After some time not working on it the vinyl cutter/plotter is now working perfectly in linux.

There are no more signal drops that were happening in windows.

The drivers are on the Whittenstein usb card that is attatched to the machine. DO NOT HACK THE CARD.

Instructions:

download inkscape, move items in the driver folder from USB card into: /home/.config/inkscape/extensions

Run inkscape and should be there under extensions, cutter/plotter.

One thing you have to do though is chmod the USB port:

   sudo chmod 0777 /dev/ttyUSB*

Where * is the USB port number

There is more on the linked website and the readme folder on the USB.

Message hipster or find him for help or any issues that arise.

Regards, Hipster

Software

The vinyl cutter will happily take HPGL piped over serial, what you use to make the HPGL is up to personal preference.

If you choose to cat an HPGL file directly to the USB serial device, consider adding a carriage return after each semicolon so that you don't buffer overflow the cutter.

Protip in vi:

:s/;/;\r/g

Inkscape can export as HPGL, and has plugins for both Linux/OSX (InkCut) and Windows (Inkscape CAMM-GL) to help fine tune cuts.

The latest development version of Inkscape is suggested (>= 4.9) as this has many more advanced options for HPGL exporting including tool offsetting, overcutting, and direct-to-serial printing.

T-Shirts

You can heat press designs onto t-shirts using the heat press

Old Vinyl Cutter

The old cutter is in the space but is not functional Equipment/VinylCutterOld