Jacob Hawkins

Well, not that I need absolute positioning, I was referring to the view in SCAL labeled WYSIWYG. I just want to be able to throw shapes on a screen and have the machine cut it out of the sheet I put on the machine, not cut half the shape out of vinyl and the other half on imaginary vinyl over the edge because the 18” line on the screen doesn’t correlate to the 18” line on the cutter.

I am aware of the actual width this machine is capable of, and I don’t expect the machine to work autonomously - my only problem is my understanding of how to set a point of origin in SCAL that translates to the same point on the cutter. For example, if I load a sheet of vinyl that is 24 inches wide and 36 inches long, and align it along the far edge (left, opposite the sensor) and feed it “backward” into the cutter so most of the length of the material is “behind” the machine, then zero the origin so the lower right corner is under the cut head on the right side and against the limit/home switch, and I specify the sheet size as a mat size in SCAL, nothing I can do will make this machine cut where I put anything in SCAL. it ends up offset by several inches on the X axis and somewhere completely different on the Y, usually in the middle of the sheet or the top, or it feeds the whole sheet out and proceeds to happily cut on the platen, to my frustration. what am I doing wrong? Is it the software configuration for the output mat size, or is it something I am not doing on the cutter, or is it me and my comprehension of how this whole thing is supposed to work. argh.

I have read the manual and the help for SCAL (I have v.4 Pro) and I am still having aggravating problems, so hopefully someone can shed some light on what is going wrong, or if it's me that is doing this wrong. The cutter I have is the series MH, 34" version - but out of the box there is a problem: while the carriage is indeed 34" wide from left to right, the mechanism appears to limit the travel by 3 inches or so. No matter what arrangement, offset, configuration, or ritual I have tried, I can not, for some unfathomable reason, place an object for cutting on the screen and have it cut at that location on the material, or drawn at that location, in any semblance of a sane manner. Perhaps it is me, with my expectations and understanding of the elements involved. I expect that software that I am sold with hardware that I purchase to be fully capable of understanding the actual hardware's physical constraints, and act accordingly - for example, if I send a job to my Designjet Z3200 that has a 44 inch wide platen, and the job is 60" wide, and I have not specified fit-to-media or have otherwise altered its dimensions to fit my Designjet's width, it DOES NOT PRINT THE JOB. I obviously am lacking knowledge here about how to align the output width to a mat width in SCAL, or some otherwise elemental and very basic information. Can someone please enlighten me as to how I can achieve this sort of real WYSIWYG instead of what appears to be quasi-WYSIWYG with floating points of origin? Thanks in advance, Jake