Roland pnc-1050 plotting problems

[kpgraphix]

Hello All, Great site.

I'm a newbie to the site but been doing signs for what feels like 100 years. I have a Roland pnc-1050 that has been a great workhorse for years. I'm having trouble with it stopping in mid cut, regardless of the size I'm cutting. I'm using SignWizard 4.1. It doesn't hapen all the time. Sometimes it will cut the entire plot, sometimes it will stops after 10-20 seconds, sometimes after minutes or so. The Tech from SignWizard called it intermittant cutting and told me to set the plotter up as a windows printer. I have had this problem on the New Windows XP and just to test it I set it up on my old Windows ME and have had the same problem. On the XP I put my dongle on a open parallel port and run a parallel cable from another parallel port to the parallel port on the plotter. On the ME I only have one port so I run them piggy backed from parallel port to parallel port on plotter. Any idea what the problem could be? As I said earlier, I'm not cutting a very large image so I don't believe the cuttig parameters are off? Anyone runing it through their serial port? Thanks for all your help.

Kenn

 

[iSign]

I used the serial port when I had one.

I also think Roland had told me it needed to be a roland serial cable... NOT just any serial cable. I wonder if you could still get one from them?

Even though you said it used to work, I'd look into that, because if you can get a cable, it should be relatively cheap & if it does work, it will have been worth it.

 

[Techman]

yes as doug says,,,

You have to have two way communications between dongle port ... and cutter and computer. If that is hindered by inproper port set up and/or the wrong cable.... the software will not know to send the next packet of info.

Be sure you have the correct cable as doug points out. And, the correct port set up. There are more then one configuration of PC's parallel port,
including ECP, EPP, bidirectional, and IEEE-1284 modes