darcshadow

baud rate is the only one that is not up to you. Baud rate is 9600 I believe, everything else you just tweak and tune till you find a setting that works for your machine. They are all different, my settings are the same for HTV as for "normal" vinyl.

Have you checked the cutting strip? If it's damaged bad enough it might cause something like this? What does the cut look like if you rotate it 180?

Yes, I used Inkscape exclusively for quite awhile. It's not an ideal cutting program but it has the advantage of being able to specify an overcut which Signblazer did not have and with the MH a slight overcut is practically a necessity. I think it was introduce in 0.91, under extension -> export -> plot. If you don't have that option, install the latest version. Once to the Plot screen, there are 3 tabls, Connections settings, Plotter Settings and Plot features. Connection settings are your comm port settings. I am lucky and actually have a serial port on my computer. If you do not have one a tripp-lite usb-2-serial adapter is recommended. Figure out what comm port you have your cutter connected to and set that as well as the speed, etc. The command language is HPGL. Once you get that setup, you'll want to cut some test squares (or use the pen attachment and some paper). Under Plotter Settings, you can change the DPI. The default settings are 1000 DPI for both x and y. That will be close but may not be exact. Draw a 10" square, measure it and adjust the DPI to correct for any size error. I have also set my rotation to 90, this makes the bottom right corner of the drawing the origin point. This makes the most sense to me with regards to the cutter output. It's up to you and makes no real difference. Lastly, under Plot Features you want to add some overcut, 1mm is a good place to start. The knife offset will also need to be adjusted 0.25 is a good starting point as well. Do a search on here for setting offset and you'll find several post explaining how to make the adjustments. There is also an inkscape cutting tool called Inkcut. It is a stand alone program that uses Inkscape. I've played with it a little but found it annoying and was just easier for me to cut straight from Inkscape.

Till you figure it out, you could just work in C. 380F = 193.3C 100F = 37.8C Really, when you're talking about numbers like these, units really don't matter, most HTVs list both units, and if they don't it's simply enough to do the conversion.

I would suspect no. The ExtraBlack would be an extra setting that is not part of a standard font library. My guess is you'll need to extract the ExtraBlack and save it as it's own font.

what if you try to cut just a simple square, how does it come out? How about if you use paper and the pen attachment?

First rule of trouble shooting, start with the easy stuff first.

Have you tried a different cable? Possible the cable has gone bad if they keep moving it around, and plugging/unplugging it.

DXF is intended more for cad programs. I don't know how the coding of them is done, but my guess is the info that tells the cad program to make a line a curve is lost when opened with a simple vector program. I've never had any luck with DXF files having curves, they all have straight lines. Some times the line segments are so short it looks like a curve, but it's not actually. As for the scaling, I don't know for sure, but bases on experience with other CAD programs, my guess is the units don't exist. Often times CAD programs save a file with non-descript units and it's up to the program that opens it to assign a real world measurement. The default for most programs is mm, because face it, us stupid Americans are the only ones that haven't made the switch to metric simply because we're too suborn. So in your design program you have it set to inches, you draw something that is say 4" long. The software however, just safes the file as 4 units long. Now you open it in a new program that is set to metric, it sees 4 units, and makes the design 4 cm. Search through your program settings and you'll probably find where you can change the unit type.

yeah

Yes, the SC2 is a stepper motor although I just found the manual and it shows it to have a resolution of 1 step = 0.001" so it should be able to get the correct dimensions. After you did the calibration routine, what are your steps per mm or inch now set to?

That seems odd but ok. If the driver is not actually installed on the PC then you'll need to download and install it. The link above is for the MK1 Driver. You probably need the MK2 Driver found here; http://www.uscuttersupport.com/downloads/Drivers/mh_mk2_driver.exe Once you have the driver installed go here and follow the setup instructions. https://support.uscutter.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037539072-MH-Setup-and-Instructional-Video

What cutter are you using? My guess, and it's just a guess mind you, you have a stepper motor cutter and the exact measurements you want do not work out to a whole number of steps. You're also talking about 0.002" and 0.012" that 1/500th and about 1/80th of an inch. What piece of wood is cut to such exact measurements? The humidity of any given day will cause the wood to change size by that much.

Ok if you're using the USB port and one software works then you have the necessary drivers installed already. The MH does not show up as a printer or cutter in device manager, it will show up under the communications category. I don't have SCAL so I don't know it's details, but some where there should be a setting for how to communicate with the cutter. Have you tried adding the cutter per the manual, section 1.01.4? https://www.iloveknk.com/0um/SCAL5/SCAL5-User-Manual.pdf

How are you connecting to the cutter? USB or Serial? If SignCut can cut on it then the cutter is setup and it's just a matter of getting Sure Cuts A Lot configured to use it.

So long as your text is not too small 951 vinyl should work great. And after having a vinyl cutter for awhile I'm sure you'll find other uses for vinyl that you never though of. However, if the text is small, weeding will be annoying, and possibly time consuming. That Labletac printer mentioned above sounds like a good solution although not as versatile.

How complex are the designs you're going to be printing? Is it something you could do with cut vinyl? That would be a much cheaper path.

A mis wire would be my first thought. Might also check all connections to the motherboard and make sure something hasn't gotten knocked loose. If you're sure that's all good, and if you have a DMM, trace the wires to the DC transformer and make sure you're getting power all the way to the transformer. If so, check the transformer out put and see if it is still working. If that's all good then next would be the motherboard. Check that the power is getting to the motherboard. If it is, then I'd suspect the motherboard has gone bad.

Had some free time and worked this up. MiniCooper Stripes.svg

Unless you can get an good high detail image auto trace will never give you the desired results. What I would suggest is a redraw/manual trace. The way I would do it using Inkscape, use the bezeir to create single lines and build the grid pattern. Then go back and use the square tool to draw a square for the white boxes. Adjust the corner roundness using the square tool. Stretch and skew the square to fill the grid as close as possible, then convert the square to a path and use the node editing tool the get the curve of the sides and fine tune the corner placement. It's not a hard design project but will be a little tedious.

If your page size is the same as your sheet of vinyl you don't want to try and cut right at the edge. Just make the page size something big, draw a box the size you want, put your design inside it and go. The page size is really only just for visual reference, it doesn't really have any impact when sending to the cutter.

Yeah, although personally I would set the page size to the size of the vinyl that way you can see how it'll fit.

I like the 15" rolls because it gives you a little wiggle room for large designs. Shirt designs are usually no bigger than 11" but occasionally I've done some that are right at 12". And I can usually fit other items/designs in the extra space so I rarely waste the extra few inches. Buying by the foot is good for colors/designs you don't plan to use often, but I would get one of the longer rolls for the big colors you'll use. White and Black are good colors for buying a 10 yrd or longer roll. Siser Easyweed is a great all around HTV. Siser also has several more specialized HTVs that are quite good as well.

And a word of warning, working with vectors can be extremely frustrating to start if you're coming from the raster world. They're great once you get use to them, but can take some time to wrap your head around. Don't get frustrated and ask as many questions as you need.

Looks good. A suggestion, keep in mind the color of background, and typically think of glass as a dark color. I personally would have put a stroke around that image and inverted the weed so that the face and skin was the light blue and the heir and outlines was window/black.