Homebrew PCBs

On 20/11/06, Leon Heller <leon.heller@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>  From: "Lez" <lez.briddon@...>
>  To: <Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com>
>  Sent: Monday, November 20, 2006 10:57 AM
>  Subject: Re: [Homebrew_PCBs] won a plotter on ebay
>
>  Lol I can see I'm going to have fun over the next week or so with this
>  new plotter........
>
>  One idea that has just comeint my head was to cover the board with a
>  resist and build a scratching pen from one of the empty pens and a
>  diamond tip from one of those emergency window hammers you see in
>  busses / trains etc. can be bought very cheap from one of  those $1/£1
>  shops that seem to spring up here and their.
>
>  Vector format, well I know diptrace can export in gerber and dxf, but
>  I am 'printing' it in bmp and then loading that into a hpgl
>  conversion, which is freeware with 15 runtimes so the first thing I
>  have outputted is the current board I am working with to a file, in
>  both normal and mirroed and outline/outline mirrored.
>
>  Odd thing, I also downloaded a hpgl viewer, and this 'file' of hpgl
>  commands looks just like the board (go figure) but all the other files
>  I have had from other software (winline etc) DONT view, maybe thats
>  why my calcomp never plotted, maybe the 'files' are still wrong
>
>  If you need a valid HPGL file, I can generate one for you for one of my PCBs
>  with the Pulsonix software I use.
>
>  Leon

Thanks, but with 'ableview' I can now see that I have a valid hpgl,
that I 'made' this morning, but the ones I made last week, are not
valid, they were all made with winline or eagle, which I use to test
the calcomp plotter with its export to calcomp feature, which the
calcomp would not respond to, so maybe I had a working cable and a
duff file.

Problem is I cant find a known good calcomp format file (cpgl, not
hpgl), apparently 'signlab' has a built in calcomp driver, but I cant
afford signlab just to test an old $10 plotter....



Lez