I just purchased a Graphtec FC7000 160 with the auto reg. mark sensor. I keep having trouble with the arms system when trying to contour cut printed graphics. It reads the first mark moves to the second reads it then comes back to the point of origin and says "mark scan error". I have tried dimming the lights, darkining the reg. mark, and moving the marks away from the print alittle ways and still hit and miss alot when it will work. I have wasted a lot of material already and getting really frustrated. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
The completely automated use of the ARMS on the Graphtec is problematic for prints much longer that 18"-24". It misses far more often than it works and it's a software thing more than hardware. The software moves the plotter form, say, mark 1 to where it thinks mark 2 ought to be and tells the plotter to find it. If where the software thinks the mark is and where it actually is is beyond the tolerances of the search area, it misses. I have no idea what software you're using but in Flexi once it misses, there's no second chance to try again unless you wisely specified 'Hold' in the job disposition and then start the job again. If you didn't set the disposition to 'Hold"' most likely you're SOL for that print. Even if you start the thing again, nothing has changed, it's just as likely to miss in subsequent attempts as well. You can nudge the media this way or that and try again and sometimes that works, but generally you lose.
If Flexi were civilized in this area it would give you the opportunity to read the marks using the plotter's facility for doing this and, failing this, let you manually set the marks using the light point. But it doesn't.
On anything larger than about 18" I usually position my own marks at the four corners of a known rectangle that contains the image and use the automatic sensing feature of the plotter. This seldom if ever fails but the downside is that if you have multiple images you have to set them up and send them which can lead to enormous job files and less than optimum cutting order. There are also some considerations with margins. You can't have any. If you do the cut will be off by the size of the margin. Moreover, it's incredibly slow. The plotter creeps from one mark to the next. Using this method the registration marks are between you and the plotter. Flexi is unaware of their existence.
You can also print with 4 point manual marks and use the built in light point to manually locate the corners. This is a reasonable alternative if you're careful, have reasonably good eyes and an understanding of parallax. Oddly, it's faster than using the plotter's built in mechanism which runs at glacial speeds. It has the charm of never failing. Ever. The downside it that it's only as accurate as you are.
