Easy and cheap hack
My office is quite cluttered with hardware. I’ve been toying with chiplotle lately but doing so meant cleaning up my desk and make room for the big clunky 80ties plotter. Chiplotle just sends serial commands, so why not over bluetooth. I ordered a
HC06 serial bluetooth module widely available
and a
serial to ttl converter powered by USB
just hooked it up together with a DB9-DB25 convertor and it just worked… pairing the HC06 was with the code 1234, instead of OSXs default 0000. besides that, no problems.
I set my
~/.chiplotle/config.py
to
serial_port_to_plotter_map = {‘/dev/tty.HC-06-DevB’ : ‘DXY-1300’}
and of we go
The whole setup is usb powered and works really smooth. I can now leave the plotter at a convenient place in my office and play with it… wirelessly yay!
Interesting, well done!
Does it support hardware handshaking?
how do I test hardware handshaking? Will do the test if you want.
K
Nice !
Just a thought: you might be able to power this from the plotter’s parallel port. It has a couple of pins that supply +5V. I don’t know if they can provide the necessary current, though
Interesting, the bluetooth isn’t exactly energy consuming, so it might work. I’ll look into it.
K
@scruss I found this
but I don’t know what kind of port this is. It’s seems to be reasonable though. Second problem is that I don’t know yet how much the devices consume, but I guess I can measure it. Away from plotter now, so it’ll have to wait a bit.
above chart comes from this page which is definitely a valuable resource, but it’s talking about the host (PC) side, never about the plotter/printer side which might be a problem, or am I wrong?