Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

An update for anyone interested.

First posted in June or there abouts my
intent to make a photoplotter along the
lines of the one John Elson did.

Said at the time I would probably take
about six months to get it done.

Well - I am about 1/2 way along my time
line and in light of other comments
around I thought I should give everyone
an update.

From the outset the plan has been to make
the whole thing with simple technology
and to do an RTFM build document on it so
anyone else can make one.

So far I have built a board that has all
that was needed to control a servo motor
and create a pixel clock. (the prototype
shown in the files section). Along with
this the CPU that created the pixel
stream (not shown in files section yet)
has been built.

Next step/goal was to get it all
comunicating with the computer. Originaly
was going to make it terminal driven and
to x-modem the plotter a TIFF file. The
hope here was to make it platform
independant. This turned out to be a
stupid idea. The TIFF standard does not
guarantee linear files :(

After giving up that idea someone pointed
me in the direction of windows Miniport
drivers.

They are very simple to make and I now
have the electonics of the photoplotter
pretending to be a normal laser printer
to any windows machine. if anyone ever
needs to do anything similar I recomend
that path.


Tasks still to complete are

1, Laser driving circuit
2, Mechanics of the drum
3, Mechaincs of the carraige


I hope to have these finished some time
soon.

NB soon is a relative term - I published
some of my first RTFM builds well over 10
years ago when I was still a teenager. If
you go and look at them on the wayback
machine I still am promising to do the
NTSC version of one of those projects
"soon" :D