Homebrew PCBs

The tactile (Braille) embossers I know of all use a hammer to impact the
dots on the paper.  The follow the raster method.  The hammer or pin
punches into a die cup (as part of the platten), and the paper gets
embossed.  This basic apprach hasn't changed much in 25 years, although of
course the printers have become better and faster.  But, their hapless
protocols have simply not updated with the times.  It is almost
impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to get one to work with a CAD
program, or any type of CNC firmware setup.  The only tactile or Braille
printers which are compatible with Windows are the Tiger printers from
Viewplus: www.viewplus.com.  With one of those beasties, it would be much,
much easier to do the ORCAD job; just a few resizings, and the labels
should be in a certain font supplied with that type of printer.  Not so,
alas, with the other types of Braille/tactile printers.

Charles

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>Now i see reason for that....
>Well, i know nothing about tactile printers.
>(honestly i didn't know the word and just read over it -
>didn't ask the dictionary the first time)
>Don't they have any "graphics" mode like the old needle printers?
>You maybe can print to file and then try to convert
>it to something useful. look for the "asci art" programms, maybe you could
>convert it to ascii. you can also export EDIF and DXF from orcad capture.
>
>how does the printer work? like an needle printer?
>I remember from needle printer times that ther was software to print
>"graphics" with them...
>
>st