Print and Cut

[mondalaci]

I'm not only using gerber2graphtec to cut stencils but to create mechanical prototypes for my PCBs before sending the gerbers to the fab - that is to take the mechanical layer and cut the countour of the board out of a relatively thick (1mm) paper. This way I can see whether the board will fit into the case that contains the board.

The next step would be to print the footprint of the components (and maybe the traces) with my inkjet printer then cut the contur with my Cameo. As a Linux user I haven't used Silhouette Studio but I've heard about the Print and Cut feature.

I'm interested in how could I make this happen on Linux, preferably with gerber2graphtec.

I'm also interested about how it works: Does the Cameo simply looks for a standard mark and sends the coordinates to the host or does it send the picture to the host and the host software looks for the registration mark? Are there any graphtec commands involved?

Thanks in advance!

[pmonta]

That's a good idea. (Sorry to get back to you so late.) I think the initial media-loading sequence might already be looking for the special Graphtec registration marks---the cutter slews the media back and forth in y a few times searching for them---but I don't know anything more than that. I think there is some minimal documentation for the low-level commands somewhere in the references in the README.

I wonder if we would do better to skip the Graphtec process and do the registration ourselves by interacting with the cutting process. That might offer better accuracy, since the user would look at auxiliary knife marks placed directly on registration lines rather than relying on the image sensor in the cutter (and its calibration). (I recall reading about the image sensor in the Silhouette brochure, and even their example looked like it was off by a good 0.5 mm or so.) The disadvantage is that one would have to interact with the CAM process as it runs by typing in "the tiny test cut is aligned with paper-mark xyz" a few times as the process goes forward, so it would not be a fire-and-forget process as with the image sensor.

I suppose it's reasonable to warp the cutting coordinate system to conform to the printed image. It's up to the user to make sure that printed image is dimensionally accurate.

Cheers,
Peter

[mondalaci]

Could you please reference the README you're talking about?

I love your idea of manual calibration but I think it'd still be useful to use automatic calibration, too. Automatic calibration could detect the registration mark with a 0.5mm accuracy and the user could further fine tune it manually in multiple steps if he wishes.

Where can I find the Silhouette brochure that you are referring to?

Could you elaborate on what you mean by wrapping the coordinate system? xy translation or something else, too?

[mondalaci]

Bump.