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General Mach Discussion / Digital Print profiling with Mach software
« on: June 14, 2010, 11:36:06 AM »
Hello, I jost posted a "hello" in the thread.
Basically, why I am here is to see if anyone else has developed a solution and I am at present preparing our company to leap into digital offset cutting of printed signage.
There is commerical solutions out there, mainly called i-cut / i-script which is normally developed into the post processor (e.g. Mach)
To explain:-
This link shows the i-cut solution http://www.icutvision.com/videos.php
The designer places registration marks (or dots in i-cut design) on the sheet, these get printed within the edges of the sheet which then a CNC software controller will then use to find the sheet.
What I want to do is something similar, I want to see if I can use a laser-pen marker to align a mach controlled head to head off coords and then process a distortion...
When you print onto a sheet of vinyl, ink and lamination changes the sheet and shrinks it around a few mm, so what I am trying to acheive is to try and replace my controller with something else that will allow us to cut around signage.
TBH we could purchase a system, but our machine is so old that most of the quotes are about replacing it, its just a waste of money and risk to update an old machine, so I am trying to set about a project to do something similar.
We used vectric vcarve, axyz 6012 with later boards (steppers), corel draw workflow...
I will then start looking at mach with our stepper controllers, it doesn't look a nightmare from the inital look, so was seeing if I could do the contour stuff as well.
I am also a part-time programmer, so thats another incentive.
Basically, why I am here is to see if anyone else has developed a solution and I am at present preparing our company to leap into digital offset cutting of printed signage.
There is commerical solutions out there, mainly called i-cut / i-script which is normally developed into the post processor (e.g. Mach)
To explain:-
This link shows the i-cut solution http://www.icutvision.com/videos.php
The designer places registration marks (or dots in i-cut design) on the sheet, these get printed within the edges of the sheet which then a CNC software controller will then use to find the sheet.
What I want to do is something similar, I want to see if I can use a laser-pen marker to align a mach controlled head to head off coords and then process a distortion...
When you print onto a sheet of vinyl, ink and lamination changes the sheet and shrinks it around a few mm, so what I am trying to acheive is to try and replace my controller with something else that will allow us to cut around signage.
TBH we could purchase a system, but our machine is so old that most of the quotes are about replacing it, its just a waste of money and risk to update an old machine, so I am trying to set about a project to do something similar.
We used vectric vcarve, axyz 6012 with later boards (steppers), corel draw workflow...
I will then start looking at mach with our stepper controllers, it doesn't look a nightmare from the inital look, so was seeing if I could do the contour stuff as well.
I am also a part-time programmer, so thats another incentive.