Help get my Agfa Sherpa 43i working...

[bhill]

Hello all,

I have an Agfa Sherpa 43i hooked up and working... at least it cleaned itself and printed a test page. It has a network connection and is accessible through the static IP address I assigned it. That's a good sign. I also hooked a PC to the parallel port and it recognized it as a 'Mutoh RJ6XXX'. However, the Mutoh drivers I downloaded from ftp.mutoh.com did not cooperate with XP. I am hoping some of you folks can point me to some information or perhaps another thread by someone going through the same steps for the first time.

I would like to avoid spending any money on software. All we would like to do is print diagrams and schematics in black only. It doesn't seem like this should be so difficult, and from what little I've read, printer drivers aren't even necessary with the right 3rd party software. Is it possibly for me to print something (other than a test page) without spending another dime? I would also be willing to code my own solution if I had a better understanding on how these printers typically receive data. If anyone has any links or ideas, I would greatly appreciate the input.

Thank you,
Ben Hill
Portland, OR

 

[grafixhenk]

as far as I know you need rip software with these units. For your needs you can get cheap rip software on eBay for about $300

 

[grafixhenk]

Actually it is $240 the program is called Future Rip

 

[bhill]

Thanks for the quick replies... this forum is remarkably active. I will look into the suggestion, but it seems to me if all I need is one piece of software, and this software is capable of communicating with the printer over a network, then it shouldn't be too difficult to sniff out how it is communicating and create my own software. Perhaps I'm better off just forking over the money, but I'd enjoy the challenge... and if there is no open source solution for what I'm trying to do, well I think that's a shame. I know it's a fat chance, but has anyone played around with this idea or came across any open source solutions for this printer or a similar one?

 

[schurms]

Get a rip and a print server or you are sol.

 

[bhill]

Sorry to second guess. I just had to see if open source rang any bells.

I'm in IT, coincidentally at a commercial printer, working with the maintenance guy who bought the Sherpa at an auction. There are prepress and design departments on the other side of the facility that use an Epson Stylus Pro 9600 connected to the network... not directly to a print server. I didn't notice that until yesterday when I went to take some paper. Anyway, the Mac tech over there had initially told maintenance they wer sol without even looking at the printer, so he might not have even known it had a network card. Isn't it likely we could print to the Sherpa the same way they print to the Epson? Both printers are on the same local network with fixed IPs.

The Mac tech is on vacation so I'll get to the bottom of this on Monday. If not, $240 isn't bad... still can't imaging there is too much going on inside that software, particularly for when printing B&W bitmaps.

Ben

 

[bhill]

It's been a while, but I thought I'd log in to mention that I found everything I needed to print without spending any money! I'll try to cover the steps I took for anyone is interested in a project... certainly, though, for the time and energy involved, it is more interesting than practical.

First, I discovered that the Agfa Sherpa 43 is nearly the exact same printer as the Mutoh rj6000, and there is an Iris counterpart, as well. Also common knowledge in the business but unbeknownst to me, all wide format printers seem to be compatible with the same printer control languages including the one I'm using, RTL, or Raster Transfer Language.

During this discovery I found some sample .rtl files and a small application to send them to the printer (TCPSend.exe or SendTCP.exe). To get them, go to www.mutoh.com and click on the download link toward the top/right of the screen and when you click on it, it will come up with a user log in and for the user name just type in ftp and there is not password just hit log in after you type in the user name. Once in the FTP site you can click on the "Printer Information Manuals" and once in there click on the "Falcon Outdoor" and finally click on the "Test Files" link and in there you will find the TCP send and a couple images you can run.

Configure your printer to receive RTL format, give it a static IP address, then use TCPSend.exe to get the files there. The application will also want a port number chich is 9100.

To convert your own documents to RTL, you need GhostScript which is completely free to use. The documentation is a bit overwealming, but to get a good basic understanding of the command line parameters, try using GhostFriend (http://www.noliturbare.com/index.php) with the 'Show Commandline' feature turned on. I actually had problems with GhostFriend so I used it's harder-to-find predecessor GoBatchGS... still not too difficult to find with google.

Finally, I packaged GhostScript along with a simple .Net application that handles the TCP/IP communications. Much like TCPSend, my application simply asks you for an ip address, port number and allows you to select a file to send... but since I have GhostScript packaged along with it, I can select .pdf, .eps, .ps or .prn files in addition to .rtl files. GhostScript launches if necessary, and my app sends the output file when the conversion to .rtl is complete.

Feel free to post here if you'd like to see some code. I'd love to get another set of eyes on it... it prints reliably well but I'm still having trouble with the data light blinking well after the print is complete. I think there are some closing TCP messages I need to send related to cutting or not cutting, or what what. Who knows. Still... cool stuff.

Ben