My d140 is driving me crazy today....

[gabagoo]

So this has been an ongoing concern for me over the last few years.

For the most part the cutter works very well. I use it strictly to cut printed vinyl from Flexi that were printed on my Mimaki.

I have tried just about everything today that I know but the opus reader refuses to co-operate.

I printed 400 decals 2 days ago on 3ml white proveer house brand (avery) stock. I ran them in lots of 56 as they were about 6" x 8"

I had one last batch of 8 to get to the full quantity.

Yesterday I started cutting them...The Summa finds all the marks effortlessly as there is no lam.

I cut about 4 of the files yesterday and left the roll on the machine to be continued today.
This morning the Opus cant read the first square and wanders aimlessly around it and even over it but for whatever reason cant read it. It beeps instructing me to digitize the point. I put the head right over the square and it immediately jumps 1/2" somewhere else and starts the wander again...

I have seen this countless times and have found that 9 times out of ten if I reboot everything... then it finds every registration point effortlessly. As annoying and time consuming as this is, it gets the job done.

Now I am a small shop so I wander away and every chance I get I come back up and start the next run... All goes well until the last 8 decals...
I have tried running it for the last hour and after 3 reboots the plotter seems to do the exact same thing and wanders and cant find anything. I even caught it actually registering white on white and shut it down before it could ruin the cut. My lighting is good and I have even put small squares of vinyl over the reg mark to assist the opus.

I called Summa and as good as the teck guys are, I seem to be the only guy that has had an intermittant problem like this.

He suggested that I try cutting from winplot that I can download from the site, but I cant seem to figure out how winplot is going to know where the Mimaki placed the registration marks so I cant think that would do much.

I cleaned the opus head with alcohol and gave it a blow job...hehehe with compressed air to clean off anything that might be stuck...
I found this black piece of vinyl stuck to the side of the opus and I have seen it there for quite a while and in the back of my mind I think it has been there since day 1 but it looks a little loose on 1 corner so I peel it off and it seems to be covering some white something or other. I am sure it was there for a reason and I will put it back on, but I tried again and again it found some registration marks and then fails at the same place. I have now spent well over an hour on this and have upset my workflow and the day is toast as my drive has totally left me....

here is a pic I took of the head with this white thing on the side...anybody know what it is and why is it covered with a square of black vinyl?

I shall go back and frustrate myself for another 20 minutes then I shall toss the graphic away and start again........
Oh the horror!!!

 

[gabagoo]

so I tried again and it failed so I thought ....lets resend the file to print and then just use that cut file and just dont print it...

It reads the first 2 marks fine...the last 2 on the upper it seems to be doing the same as before only this time instead of wandering around aimlessly and eating up valuable time it beeps to be digitized fast and I set the head over the mark and it reads it...great!!! One to go and I can move on.... I watch and it moves a whole 8"...Thats right just 8" and I see the head starts to look for the mark and even though it actually is right over the mark it drops down about a half inch and starts looking there. Luckily again it beeps rather fast and I move it in place, it reads it and a minute later they are all cut.

I just have to say WTF is going on here?

So is Flexi the culprit? How?

uggggg....

I now have to motivate myself to get back to where I should have been....

 

[FrankW]

The name of the feature is OPOS, not Opus.

The piece of vinyl you have removed is standard, below there are potentiometers with which the sensors will be calibrated in the factory. I hope you havent changed anything at that little "screws". I would cover it again asap.

Have you tried a media calibration (put a piece of media in the plotter with a black area like the printed OPOS-Marks and white area like the background and let the plotter measure the contrast)?

If media calibration do not see a difference between black and white, it could be that there is dirt below the sensor. the sensor itself do not touch the media, its a hole there, the sensor is around 1mm inside this hole. If there is dirt in this hole, even alcohol and blowing it will not really help.

Its the print exactly the same? If the plotter is an "old" one with the old standard OPOS it could be very sensitive with changes of black density etc.

 

[gabagoo]

No changes in density... I have had these issues basically for the last 6 years.... Sometimes it is simply a reboot and everything runs fine.... I can't see that being an OPOS issue!!! On the other hand I don't know exactly what the software has to do with the plotter looking in the wrong areas for the registration marks and then once set up manually to see them, it jumps away back to where it wants to look.
Very frustrating as it is not a problem that happens everyday, because if it was the machine would have been kicked down and out of here 5 years ago.

The cutter itself is excellent when it wants to be.

I just can't believe that I am the only one that Summa techs have talked to with a problem like this.

 

[FrankW]

As far as I have checked your text (english is not my native language) you have two problems:

Problem 1:

Markers are available at the right position but the OPOS-sensor do not recognize them. If so you should use media calibration to calibrate the contrast sensitivity. It could happen that the media calibration will not recognize a contrast to work reliable, but in that case you get an error message.

As I have told before, because you have the "old" OPOS (instead of OPOS X), it could happen that depending of density, used laminate and other circumstances the marker recognition don't work reliable. This OPOS is developped in 1995 mostly for screen printing, and run into trouble with some inkjet-printers. The newer OPOS X works much more reliable on worse situations too. It's possible to change the "old" OPOS-Sensor to a "OPOS X-like" on older machines (just the sensor, not additional functionality like OPOS XY and so on), should work better (not tested until now).

It's a different problem when the plotter searches the markers at the wrong position. OPOS needs markers of a defined range of shape and size, AND informations in the plot file which describes the set values to the plotter (to compare assumed and real values to match the plot file to the cut file). If generating print- and plot-files at the same time, than the values probably match. If for example generating a print file from a Flexi-file and a cut-file from a Flexi-file separately when needed, just a little change like a difference in the distances between the copies or such could generate problems as described.