By:
On:

For the past couple of months I’ve been playing around with a personal project to write images to our shop’s vinyl cutter. Recently Travis discovered that if a very large image is sent to the cutter all at once, it will cause a serial buffer overflow and crash the knife.

The natural reaction is to enable flow control (page 15) on the serial device, such that the vinyl cutter can step back from the brink if the buffer fills up. But that doesn’t seem to work for whatever reason — I suspect that my shoddy USB to serial adapter doesn’t support it.

So I made a feature that will take the movement speed of the vinyl cutter, estimate the duration of each line segment’s execution, and then send the serial as smaller chunks in intervals. This does work, but we noticed that the time calculated doesn’t match up with the time it actually takes the vinyl cutter to route a shape. Sometimes it’s off target by up to half a minute… What’s up with that?

Read More →

Vinyl Cutter ML256 Logo

By:
On:

Some of the members of Makers Local 256 pitched in to the buy the shop a brand new vinyl cutter! The new USCutter MH-871 Vinyl Cutter can be used to cut stickers, decals, logos, signs, banners, stencils, card stock, and much more. A group order was also made to stock up on rolls of vinyl, as well as some extra blades and other tools. The cutter is a welcome addition to our growing collection of computer-controlled tools!

The cutter can support up to 34″ rolls of vinyl, and can cut objects up to 30″ wide by 8′ long. A dedicated computer has been set up next to the cutter in order to send designs to be printed. It’s incredibly simple to use, and it’s a lot of fun! Come in and check it out!