drewp for 2006 June

[link] 2006-06-06T21:21:25 Xyron cutter:

I really want this Xyron Personal Cutting System paper cutter to be computer controlled. It's normally controlled by removable AT45DB041B 4-megabit flash chips, but it has a secret usb port in it (among a few other secret connectors). The brain is an Atmel ATMEGA64 talking to two L6219DS motor drivers. If I can't talk to the CPU, I will have to talk to the motor drivers (hard to access) or straight to the motors, with my own drivers.

I plugged the usb into a ubuntu laptop, but I didn't see any usual usb handshaking in my logs. Unfortunately there's no reference program to sniff the protocol from. For all I know, the usb port is asleep until the right flash chip is plugged in.

http://quickwitretort.com/xpcs/

[link] (1) 2006-06-20T00:29:34 New driver for Xyron Personal Cutting System:

I gave up on all the software interfaces to the cutter and built a new driver for the one interface I knew, which is the stepper motor. I constructed the most obvious circuit from two FAN8200 motor drivers and a small relay (the darlington I had was dropping too much voltage and the blade solenoid wouldn't fire). It connects to a parallel port and uses the same 16V power supply as the XPCS came with.

With a trivial program, I can now drag the mouse on the screen and the blade will chase after the mouse position, and I can press spacebar to toggle the blade up/down position.

Next, I need to write software to drive the blade over precise curves, and start figuring out what the constraints are. For one thing, you can't draw a pointy V the normal way, because the blade won't turn around fast enough and it'll pick up the paper on the way back up. For that shape, you have to round the corner, or draw two separate downward strokes.

Unless otherwise noted, all content licensed by Drew Perttula under a Creative Commons License.