Is it possible to make your plotter wireless?

[schramm]

I have then entire upstairs of a early 1900's Victorian home as my office, problem is in the area that I have my plotter right now the floor is slightly uneven, I want to put my plotter in a different room but the issue is that my desk will be better then 15' away. Short of going out and buying a 20' USB cable (which may cause data problems) is there a way to make my plotter wireless? I have the Vinyl Express Q100 and my computer is a iMac 27". I have googled the subject and some people talk about it but there is no real information on the net about it. If someone knows if it can be done or if there is a device I can buy to make it work I am open to about anything. I like the layout of my office and cutting areas and really do not want to change that.

Thanks

 

[CanuckSigns]

oooo interesting question, Hopefully someone can give you an answer, would be very cool if you could

 

[Locals Find!]

This may seem like a dumb question. (I don't have a larger format printer) so if it is forgive me.

Couldn't you network another computer in the same room as your printer to send the work through? I know I have a wireless network and I can print off the Normal inkjet printer from my laptop. The printer is connected to my desktop.

 

[AUTO-FX]

A wireless usb adapter and a wireless router and you can connect. You would likely lose the ability to poll media size.

 

[round man]

it would seem that a slave pc and or old mac could serve as a unit to run the plotter and be networked via wlan(wireless local area network) would be the simplest way to achieve what you want to do. It doesn't take a power house design station to drive a plotter as the process is simple enough to run on an old 486 era processor,....when it is all said and done it would seem more practical and economical to hard wire a network to achieve more a more stable connection to drive a plotter.

 

[MikePro]

20' of USB = 20' of wireless in terms of data problems... slim to none.

 

[MikePro]

noted: I run my plotter from a computer 5' away, but also have a 20' cable running through the ceiling to my print-rip computer to send contour cuts from.

 

[bayshorecreations]

Fix the floor.

 

[chrisphilipps]

It all depends on the software that you are using to drive the plotter; it must be able to send to an IP address. I know that Flexi will work with this setup; this is how we have the FC8000 setup in our demo room. Linksys makes a wireless print server, once you have the print server up and running and you have the IP address of the print server you just change the setup in your software to point to the IP address instead of the USB port. The only issue is like Auto-FX said above you will no longer be able to do poll sizing, other than that the cutter will work normally.

 

[signcrafters london]

You can do it easily. But like round man said, hardwiring would be more reliable. I had an old Vinyl Express Lynx plotter that I used wirelessly. I'd get an error on ~ 1 out of 10 jobs or so, but I'm sure that was due to the crappy Linksys print server I was using.

When I first got my JV3 printer, I didn't have a firewire cable and I tested it using the wireless print server. It worked, but I wouldn't dare trust any big or important jobs to be done that way.

 

[noregrets]

you could try an airport express maybe?

http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/

 

[schramm]

To tell you honestly everything in my office is ran wireless except the cable modem and router. I have a 100 meg business set up from Comcast (it is freaking scary fast). I use that only because of the number of computer and wireless devices we have in the house. I thought that I needed a wireless USB plugin but wanted to see if anyone had done this on here. None of the computers in the house are connected to the modem or the router. I dont mind the whole 20' USB cable thing but I absolutely hate wires hanging as it looks like crap.

I got a kick out of fix the floor as if this was my house it would be fixed but since I rent this house I am just dealing with it. Most rooms dont have any issues but the one so with some carful changes I like the layout and room I have 600 sf of office in 3 rooms plus 2 large closets.

Thanks for the help I will check it out.

Rob