AncientPlotter

This repository is a work in progress to revive a COGI CT-630 (and all its OEM-Name-Clones) serial Plotter.

I've found some true and untrue informations as well as some Python-software in the web, however the found software always enforced me to painfully deal with the Python dependencies on MacOS. So I assembled what needed to be done and wrote this little tool. Thanks to the past Python developers to discover the CT-630 endsequence-codes and publishing them on the web.

Additional motivation

Inkscape in the version 1.3.2 at time of writing can save to .hpgl files (this is my way to convert a svg to a hpgl). However these have proven to be incompatible with my version of the CT-630. Therefore ancientPlotter does the following to succeed:

parse the given hpgl-file and split out all incompatible series to single instructions
send one instruction at once (there is reportedly a buffer problem with this plotter)
send the end-sequence

Contribution

Feel free to file a PR if you like. I will try to process ASAP.

Binary distribution

This repository has binaries for Windows, Linux and MacOS each compiled for arm64 (intel) or arm64 (Apple / Raspberry) in the bin folder. However, at least MacOS won't allow you to execute a binary directly loaded from the internet - which is pretty understandable.

Using docker - WIP

I will - somewhere in the future - add a github-CI soon which will provide a docker image for the above mentioned architectures.

Building on your own

The safest way is to build the executable on your own. Here is how on Linux and MacOS. I dont have a clue how to do anything on Windows. If you found out, feel free to open a PR to this readme with instructions 😚

Install go in your favourite way.
Install git if not already done.
Checkout this repository and build the binary.

# go and git are already installed
git clone https://github.com/Dirk007/ancientPlotter.git
cd ancientPlotter
go build .

go will hopefully download all dependencies and place you a nice ancientPlotter executable in the current directory. You should be able to run it straight ahead

./ancientPlotter

Usage

ancientPlotter [--serial-device <device>] [--dry-run] [--print-only] [--serve] [--port <port> (default 11175)] filename.hpgl

--serve

Spin up this tool as a backend serving the required HTML and Websockets to drive your plotter.

You can reach the service by invoking http://127.0.0.1:11175/ (or whatever port you assigned). The documents will be served from assets. You can modify them at will at runtime. They will be freshly read and rendered on each onvocation.

Please don't blame me for the bad quality - I am everything but a frontend engineer.

--port

If you specifiy this parameter and also use the --serve option, the default port 11175 will be overriden with this value.

--filename

The only required parameter if you use this tool as a CLI, specifies which file you want to plot. The path can be absolute or relative - it does not matter. If you serve this parameter will simply be ignored.

Ony the first given file will be plotted.

--serial-device

Specify the path to your serial-device where the Plotter is connected to. For example --serial-device /dev/tty.usbserial-10. The name of the port highly depends on your system but something with usb should point you to the right direction.

This parameter is optional - if you don't specify the serial-device, ancientPlotter tries to guess (relatively dumb) the right port. This works for me on my Mac, but I have no idea how stable it is on other machines. Maybe you can leave some feedback about that.

--dry-run

If you specify this parameter, the instructions will be pached on the fly to not put the pen (cutter) down but always keep it hovering. I made this to not ruin too much foil while exploring the plotters functionality / scale. Maybe it is useful for someone else so I kept it. You may use it to see if your scaling is more or less correct. WARNING I have no idea if this will cause damage to the plotter if done too often. I am relatively sure that the plotter is designed to work with the resistence of the foil. But not sure. However, you've been warned.

--print-only

If you specify this parameter, the instructions will not be sent to the Plotter but printed to the console instead. It is just for educational reasons and for debugging.

Other resources in the web

You make take a look at stratum0.org which initially brought me some knowledge about this little diva of a Plotter.

# README