Custom Drivers????

[RiXaX]

I'm happy with my old 7.62 version. I don't print and investing in the newer versions offers me close to nothing that I can't do now...except, I want to buy a new cutter and the old Flexi does'nt have drivers for the new plotters. Anyone have any ideas ?

 

[J Hill Designs]

upgrade flexi?

seriously, you can try generic HPGL/GPGL drivers and see if it works first

 

[round man]

Rick most plotters only use one of about three plotter languages,...gerber uses one that is theirs alone but 99% of the rest of vinyl cutting plotters use either hp-gl (hewlit packard graphics language) or dmpl (houston instruments languge),.....more than likely you can load a compatible driver for the same model plotter size only an earlier model and it will function as if it were the right plotter,....you might not be able to access all the bells and whistles from the newer plotter,but it should still cut vinyl just fine,....I'll email you with my new phone number and we can probably come up with a driver or compatible generic driver that will work just fine,...I have a buddy who uses flexi and copies and pastes his design from from corel to flexi to cut,....my bet is you can do the same in reverse with the newer plugins for a graphtec this way from flexi to corel to cutmaster,....I would also know that the drivers for vinyl express lxi (signwarehouse's rebranded version of flexi) work just fine for flexi as they are the same program,....it really shouldn't be an issue with most name brand plotters,...the software is stupid it only knows what you tell it as to what plotter is attached to your computer and sometimes you have to lie to it in order for it to work,...the software companies don't want to go thru the experimentation on a large scale when they can sell you something they know already works and make a profit from you at the same time,....it's not as difficult as you might think to work around this issue,....

 

[FrankW]

Be aware of that your Flexi should support the ports of the plotter. For example, driving an Summa S-Class (Introduction 2005) with Scanvec CASmate (developement stopped in 1997, using a SummaSign Driver) will work without problems with the old S-Class Model because this model have still a serial port, but not with the S-Class 2 because CASmate don't support USB- or Network-Ports.

Summa USB- or Network-Ports are no problem with Flexi 7, but I'm not shure with other manufacturers plotters.

 

[SightLine]

You "might" also be able to get someone with a newer version of Flexi to "add setup" for the model you want in their production manager. Then they can copy some very specific key dll files and folders. You would need to place those exact files and folders to the appropriate locations on your machine then the final step is manually editing a couple of ini files to add the machines info. Restart Flexi and viola, it is there. I've done this successfully to get a newer Mimaki JV33 working in Flexi 8.1 using the drivers from Flexi 8.5. That being said it was a complicated process and it took a good bit of going back and forth finding more files and whatnot and it might not be possible going to even larger version jumps if Flexi made big changes to the machine driver structure and configuration.