Joshua L. Blocher wrote:
On Tuesday 10 March 2009 08:29:22 stuart wrote:
Hi...
No promises, but I'm mildly interested in getting inkscape to cut directly to small craft Graphtec plotters on any platform that inkscape is supported on w/o installing additional interpreters like Python or PERL. I know this has been talked about before, but I don't think there are any technical discussions to be found here as to how to do it.
Looking at the inkscape wiki, all I see are plugins that translate between formats. I'm not terribly interested in saving yet another format on my HDD and would prefer just to print to the plotter. However, I'm not sure this is even possible plugin or not.
Stuart,
I have updated https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/35004 . We are in talks to get this sorted and welcome your input and involvement. We talked about more then that Jon Cruz and/or I will put up a wiki page in a day or two clarify what the current status is for all parties involved.
Joshua L. Blocher verbalshadow
Hi Joshua...
Thanks for following up.
Things to think about:
What is covered? I assume the old and new CraftRobo are of interest. But what about their identical twins the old and new Wishblades?
What about the USB drivers? All these plotters / cutters use a USB interface. In Linux I don't think there will be a problem (i.e. we can use the generic USB serial port simulator) unless we want to use the optical pick up on the cutter head (I never find my self using this). However, windows, AFAIK, is a different story. The process to create a USB driver is so convoluted under windows I doubt anyone here has undertook the challenge (someone prove me wrong :)). That leaves the older Wishblades in the dust WRT windows Vista. So, no matter what we do w/inkscape, windows Vista users will, from what I understand, never be able to use their older "blue" Wishblades. Well, unless we re-write the USB driver for Vista.
However, if we did dip into the USB driver code - I propose this: That we don't change anything about inkscape. Rather, we change the USB driver to identify and interpret inkscape post script output much like Vidar's Python script does. In fact, I suspect the newer Graphtec drivers do this as there have been rumblings that people can cut from inkscape directly to their plotters. However, I've also been told, it's not reliable. I have not be able to try this as I suspect my Wishblade will not work with RoboCraft drivers - probably only because of the way it identifies it's self to the computer - and not because it is truly incompatible - sigh.