May 29, 2008

Technology passed me by...

Until I dragged it down and beat it in to submission...

A friend of mine has a big ink jet plotter (Cadjet 2) they weren't using... I've got a number of surplus vintage wood working machines... He collects such machines as well... So a swap was in order...

He came by to see what I had available a couple days ago while on the way home from picking up a little machine north of me... We kicked the tires on a few of my machines, and he then suggested bringing in the plotter, which I had not expected... I figured we would swap when the machine of his choice could come out of my shop lineup... So he left it with me, along with a load of paper for it, and headed on his merry way...

I played with it a bit yesterday, but it seemed like the cable I had was giving me fits... So I brought another cable in today... New ink cartridges came in today as well... Well I beat my head against that thing all day... Its an older machine, though there are still plenty of them in use... Problem is in my case, I hadn't evolved with the machine like everyone else that owned one from way back... It's a mid 90's ink jet... I can't imagine what it cost then, I was still working with pen plotters, and dot matrix plotters then... Well it got to be 5pm and I debated going home, but figured I didn't have any reason to rush here, and it was quiet now, so perhaps I'd have better luck...

All it took was the right search string in Google... I happened across a post from someone trying to get it to work with the "new" OS of the day... Windows 95... Seems in Win 95, Microsoft came up with the ECP or Enhanced Capabilities Parallel Port... It was way faster than the earlier version, and helped with their plug and play deal... Well guess what... Its too damn fast... I guess hardware wasn't talking back and forth yet then, because the plotter can't tell the computer to slow down... The data comes down the ECP line so fast the plotter can't handle it... So after beating my head against XP for a bit, because hell who would want a slower port, so why put that info in the help... I did finally figure out how to get XP to roll back to an EPP port, after having to set it that way in the BIOS as well...

Suddenly, I hit print, and while it isn't a barn burner, I now can have nice big E size prints... I'll work on the speed issue... I'll just have to get AutoCAD to go to monochrome, and use line thickness for clarity rather than color, which is my usual MO on the 11x17 printer... I can do both in the same drawing, and the plotter has some features that will help with that as well...

Posted by Backstage at May 29, 2008 07:22 PM
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