Running two Graphtec FC-9000 with one PC

[scox]

Hi Friends, Long time lurker and wildly appreciative of the collected knowledge here. Would appreciate any thoughts on the following...

We recently acquired a second Graphtec FC-9000 and have been successfully operating two of them via a single PC using Illustrator and cutting master 5. We use these mostly for cutting stickers that are printed on our mimakis. For about two weeks everything has been running fine, able to cut different files on each cutter, a little chunky going back and forth but working. Over the last couple of days both cutters have been behaving strangely, cutting one of two conditions and moving on to the next, delayed response, having to hit the send button twice and having both cutters start looking for a crop mark when the file was sent to only one cutter. These aren't constants, and I'm not spotting any particular patterns. It seems like the data is getting a *little* crossed sometimes? Both of these cutters are on a direct USB cable to the PC, on separate ports. Anyone have any experience with a like or similar set up?

Thanks for any thoughts and input,
...Seth Cox

 

[cmoist]

I'm running three machines (FC9000, two FCX2000) on CM4 from one machine. Not having any problems that aren't self inflicted (picking the wrong machine from the dropdown). I do run them on a network though, which I understand to be much more reliable than via USB. You might try switching to ethernet.

 

[scox]

I'm running three machines (FC9000, two FCX2000) on CM4 from one machine. Not having any problems that aren't self inflicted (picking the wrong machine from the dropdown). I do run them on a network though, which I understand to be much more reliable than via USB. You might try switching to ethernet.

Thanks for the input, glad to hear others are successfully doing it, couldn't find much when I was deciding to try it this way. I'll look into putting these guys on our network, was a bit hesitant as we had to take our mimakis off network due to some really weird issues.