Plotter

On December 20, 2009, someone (who?) donated a beautiful HP DraftMaster I pen plotter (HP P/N 7595A).

There's a Flickr set of somebody else's DraftMaster for reference.

Our plotter:

• appears to be in good physical condition
• comes with a pen carousel
• comes with one pen holder (holding a #2 pencil, nach)
• has a DB-25 that probably wants to speak HP-GL over RS-232

spit something out to it: dd if=/somefile of=/dev/ttyUSB0 bs=1

Carousel setup

Documentation

• Manuals and User Guides and product info, from HP museum.

HPGL Software:

• Inkscape, a vector drawing program, can export HPGL.
• Uniconvertor may be able to output HPGL.
• hp2xx, a hpgl to jpg converter for sanity checking.

• draftingsteals.com
• wncsupply.com

Wikipedia: Plotter, HPGL

Program that seems to work:

IN;
SC0,40,0,40;
SP7;
PU0,0;
PD100,0,100,100,0,100,0,0;
PU50,50;
CI25;

Use It

Settings:

• Your program needs to use DOS line endings (\r\n)
• Serial is 9600 8N1 on the PC side, plugged into the COMPUTER/MODEM port via a null modem cable
• SERIAL:
  • DATAFLOW: REMOTE, STANDALONE
  • PARITY: 1
  • BAUD: 9600
  • HARDWIRE: OFF

Using Inkscape:

• Load (or create) your vector graphic in Inkscape
• Prepare the image for printing:
• Scale the image (Inkscape mm units appear to work correctly)
• Flip the image horizontally (for some reason, the plotter is printing it backwards)
• Select 'save as', then 'HP Graphics Language'.
• Open this file in a text editor, and copy the text
• Paste the file into your terminal program, configured as above (CoolTerm in OS/X or Minicom in Linux)
• Enjoy your plot!

Example:

[Plotted Noisebridge Logo] HPGL for NoiseBridge Logo