Old pen plotter

[tpot]

Hi

I am looking for an old style flatbed pen plotter, like a Roland DXY-890. There are a couple on ebay, they are over £250 which for my project are overpriced, especially for 20 year old technology.

If anybody has any ideas where I could pick one of these up for less than £100 that would be great.

Thanks
Andy

 

[Eric The Viking]

Can't help with where, but the HP plotters used to be built like tanks, the only problem now being the HP-IB (GPIB/IEE 488) interface which is an 8-bit parallel bus and rather tricky to find adaptors for now to something like USB.

That said, HP-IB/GPIB is still used in test & measurement applications, but last time I looked a card was horribly pricey. Some of them also have Centronics and very occasionally RS232 (the interface(s) was often a plug-in card). They found many uses in the lab in the factory where I worked, for example carrying sensors across circuit boards. They're also pretty well documented and relatively easy to program.

I now really wish I'd kept the one HP gave me years ago...

HTH, E.

 

[Sheffield Tony]

Damn. I threw two of these away, a Roland one, and another HPGL driven type that was much better built. Both worked perfectly, but I decided I had had enough of making PCBs with wet chemistry.

I think getting the pens might be a challenge now !

 

[tpot]

Thanks for the reply guys. Seems that these have all been snapped up by people making their own PCBs.

To be honest I am not worried about the availability of pens as I was going to fit it with a drag knife with a diamond glass cutter to help with the cutting of complex shapes out of glass for a glass fusing project.

Thanks
tpot

 

[novocaine]

I was going to suggest you look for a machine called and axidraw. but then I looked at the price now and changed my mind.