> > Roger Lucas wrote:
> > I am just starting to try to figure out BMP to raster
> > for the PCB EDM MILL for which I have just finished
> > the drive electronics <SNIP>
> >
> > Are you dumping the BMP file to
> > a separate micro or driving an interface direcly from
> > the PC? <SNIP>
> Andrewm with the goat blood on his hands wrote:
> <Snip marraige proposals>
> I am dumping the BMP file to a seperate Micro.
> <Snip>
> The idea is to have the ATMEL sit on a seriel port,
> then you run some terminal software on the PC and
> xmodem transfer the file to it.
> <Snip>
> I was going to use TIFF file format with G3 fax
> compression instead of BMP. On most PCB files you will
> get about a 10:1 compression ratio with G3.
> <snip>
> Worst case senario and I can't get an atmel to decode
> G3 fax - I will hang my head in shame, do my own
> RLE compression in software on the PC side and admit
> to the world in general that pop-up-toasters do in
> fact need 1 gighertz embeded Power-PCs.
I am surprised no one quiped that a 1 Ghz CPU in a
toaster could be the heating element.
ANYWAYS - point of the post.
Mr Roger Lucas,
I have finished reading the TIFF specifications
carefully and also looked at some TIFF/G3 files in
a hex editor. It is very doable from a seriel
stream as long as the saving application does not
put the segments of the picture out of order.
Most of the apps I have looked at so far have saved
the TIFF in a suitable format.
I will over the next few weeks cut-paste/write
atmel code to:
- Act as a terminal
- Accept an X-Modem-CRC/128 file transfer
- Decode the TIFF header info and report if the
file is suitable
- Decompress the RLE/Huffman data into a stream
of black and white pixels
If your EDM hardware uses an ATMEL you are more
than welcome to the code. Even if you use another
micro you might like to look at the flow/logic/
pseudo/comments to see if you want to convert the
thing to run on your micro.