drewp for 2006 June 20
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[Comments] (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.

motor driver and hacked-up XPCS closeup of motor driver sample cutout

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.

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