Hello fellow signmakers! Thanks for accepting me on the forum!
A friend of mine lent me an old Roland PNC-950 he had laying around in his garage collecting dust. We've managed to turn it on with my boyfriend, both the circle/square test and the Camm logo come out fine.
I've installed different softwares but none seem to work. Here's what we've done:
Plugged in the plotter with a serial to USB cable to a USB port which is assigned COM4 or COM6 (depending on the computer we've tried), installed both the official Roland legacy driver (which is theoretically useless if we're plugging into a USB port and not a good old serial or parallel port at the back of an old PC) and the more pertinent CH340 driver for the USB port. All the dip switches are set to OFF for the moment and we've settled on the following settings:
Baud rate 9600
Data bits 8
Stop bits 1
Parity None
Flow Control Xon/Xoff
The furthest we got on the computer running 64bit Windows 10 was to send the data to the plotter (from Inkscape and then Signcut Pro) and it wakes up the plotter and either it would cut a series of random letters and numbers, it would print a dot or nothing at all. And that damn error light flashing.
So we plugged in the plotter to my old laptop — still thru a USB port but this time running 32bit Windows XP, and Corel Draw X3. I have both the Roland driver and the USB port driver, in case one of them would be useful, COMM4 port, the dip switch settings are as indicated above.
I drew a square (hairline outline, empty inside as far as I know), hit print preview, square is bottom left, turn on plotter, hit setup, pen goes to left corner of my sheet, in Corel my plotter is selected correctly, I hit the print button and the error light flashes immediately.
EDIT: I just got the blade to tap the vinyl once after sending the job then nothing.
EDIT 2: I enlarged my square, I think it was too small, the plotter is cutting jibberish again!! haha I didn't think failure would get me this excited.
I feel like we've regressed, I'm not even getting the weird strings of letters and numbers anymore. Do I need to change cables? Or maybe my settings are wrong? A magic workaround? I've heard it's very hard to get the plotter to work on a 64 bit system, I was hoping my old laptop would communicate better with the cutter but no luck. I'm wondering if anyone has a similar setup and managed to get it working.
Getting this old machine to run would be a dream, it's so cool ! I mean this is history xD Thanks for taking the time to read!
A friend of mine lent me an old Roland PNC-950 he had laying around in his garage collecting dust. We've managed to turn it on with my boyfriend, both the circle/square test and the Camm logo come out fine.
I've installed different softwares but none seem to work. Here's what we've done:
Plugged in the plotter with a serial to USB cable to a USB port which is assigned COM4 or COM6 (depending on the computer we've tried), installed both the official Roland legacy driver (which is theoretically useless if we're plugging into a USB port and not a good old serial or parallel port at the back of an old PC) and the more pertinent CH340 driver for the USB port. All the dip switches are set to OFF for the moment and we've settled on the following settings:
Baud rate 9600
Data bits 8
Stop bits 1
Parity None
Flow Control Xon/Xoff
The furthest we got on the computer running 64bit Windows 10 was to send the data to the plotter (from Inkscape and then Signcut Pro) and it wakes up the plotter and either it would cut a series of random letters and numbers, it would print a dot or nothing at all. And that damn error light flashing.
So we plugged in the plotter to my old laptop — still thru a USB port but this time running 32bit Windows XP, and Corel Draw X3. I have both the Roland driver and the USB port driver, in case one of them would be useful, COMM4 port, the dip switch settings are as indicated above.
I drew a square (hairline outline, empty inside as far as I know), hit print preview, square is bottom left, turn on plotter, hit setup, pen goes to left corner of my sheet, in Corel my plotter is selected correctly, I hit the print button and the error light flashes immediately.
EDIT: I just got the blade to tap the vinyl once after sending the job then nothing.
EDIT 2: I enlarged my square, I think it was too small, the plotter is cutting jibberish again!! haha I didn't think failure would get me this excited.
I feel like we've regressed, I'm not even getting the weird strings of letters and numbers anymore. Do I need to change cables? Or maybe my settings are wrong? A magic workaround? I've heard it's very hard to get the plotter to work on a 64 bit system, I was hoping my old laptop would communicate better with the cutter but no luck. I'm wondering if anyone has a similar setup and managed to get it working.
Getting this old machine to run would be a dream, it's so cool ! I mean this is history xD Thanks for taking the time to read!
Last edited:
