How does process color work

[sdfine]

Vacpress,

I understand you 100%. When I saw the pixelation web site I read every page on his web site and every patent he listed. Like you, when I see a piece of equipment like this my mind runs with all the possibilities. You have to appreciate the efforts of guys like Dean at Pixelation who has the knowhow to design, build and pull together the hardware and software for such a cool machine. His Wirejet chain chimbing machine is pretty cool too. I'm currently living in an apartment or I'd be building one right along with you.

sdfine

[sdfine]

Vacpress,

My plan would be to use a single black print head (airbrush) and try printing black and white images first. I'm a Visual Basic programmer. In Vb I can load an image, read each pixel's color, interpret how long to spray the printhead to create that color (level of gray), move the X and Y axes to the first position and spray a dot. It would continue through this logic row after row until the image is complete. A more complex algorithm could be created to enlarge the image by spraying groups of dots for each pixel. It may be crude but it would be a start and the airbrus isn't that precise anyway. This would also be significantly easier than trying to find the information and learn how to create a standard print driver and interface to a RIP.

Steve

[vacpress]

This link has Lots & lots of information about programming for control and graphics.. its fairly usefull seeming. lots of info about opensource projects...

http://www.orocos.org/related.html

[tachus42]

The script a put up earlier was a perl scipt intended to run on the computer with Ghostscript and a GCode interperter as a quick and dirty way of getting some output. I wasn't suggesting to run perl on a microcontroller, I was just saying that it's easy to "decode" this file format.
publitime
A PIC16F84A almost meets the bill with 15 i/o pins two will be used for the crystal because i think you need acurate timing 2*4 for the steppermotors and 4 for the color jets there is on pin left and we need a least two for a serial port. Also it has no hardware serial port so you would need to bit bang the serial which could be a bit tricky when you are using the (single) timer for other stuff. It would be better to use a slightly "bigger" PIC.
I use AVRs and the gcc C compiler for stuff like this.

[vacpress]

someone needs to write "easy RIP" that simulates a print driver, but actually is sort of like a "print driver macro language" which allows someone to write batch files, or other scripts which do the command-line style image processing with ghostscript to get the right image format, then does the perl script to convert into gcode or hpgl, then sends the file over serial to the pic that is the step generator. that way the thing would be very self cotnained, easy to rig... the hardest part would be making it work for more than very specific image setups.. i would imagine this thing could produce strange results... i am really really looking forward to seeing this thing scan a page like it thinks its a inkjet printer.

my dad has been in the laser printer repair industry for 15 or 20 years. he is going to flip when he realizes ive created a real printer from scrap... with help of course.

by the way, tachus and sdfine, your help is appreciated. i really hope i get this thing far enough along to reallt be able to need your skills. it seems like you guys can rig this software, to at least get me started with creating rasterized images... swell!