Roland Plotter

The objective of the project was to upgrade a Roland DXY-100 pen plotter. The specific changes were:


The DXY-100 was one of the earliest Roland plotters, released in 1982.  It was the smallest of a series of plotters from Roland, leading up to the current range of vinyl cutters, based on much the same technology. Large format plotters were eventually replaced by laser printers, and it is difficult to find a large format plotter today. So old ones are worth re-purposing.

The plotter is constructed with a top rail for the x-axis carriage. The x-axis motor drives the whole of the x-axis carriage left and right with a simple loop around a pulley at the opposite end of the rail.  A rail mounted vertically on the x-axis carriage holds the y carriage with the pen holder.  The y-axis motor is mounted on the frame at the other end of the x-axis rail.  It uses a wire loop through a complex series of pulleys to drive the y-axis car up and down while maintaining the same vertical position for any location of the x-axis carriage. A solenoid at the top of the x-axis assembly moves the pen holder up and down using the tension in a wire strung from the solenoid to the lower end of the y-axis arm via a lever that moves the pen holder.

The power supply and controller are housed in a separate module that fits below the top rail to the right of the plotting surface.  This separate box was probably designed so that the plotter could be stood up at an angle against a frame. This feature means that it is easy to simply replace the whole controller box with a new one.

The mechanics of the plotter were quite acceptable, providing good resolution and repeatability, a nice pen holder and a good size plotting surface.  But it was completely out of date.

The controller actually stopped working at the start of the upgrade, The original purpose of the upgrade was to replace the controller language, but with the controller not functioning the replacement of the whole controller became the primary objective.

The original plotter language was Roland-specific and there were almost no utilities available that supported it. There was a single font, and it looked quite strange.  The available plotting commands were quite limited.   It might have been possible to create a translator from one of the more common languages, but it would have been a lot of work, and many of the primitive shape commands would have to be created from scratch.   The interface was a standard parallel port, and these were become less available on newer PCs.  But the controller had died, so the original controller facilities had become irrelevant.

The original design did not use the whole of the platen area, so an upgrade could be tweaked to get a worthwhile improvement in the maximum plot size.The final result was 350mm x 245mm - about mid way between A4 and A3.

The original design required the operator to manually zero the plotter before powering on.  This was a nuisance to remember to do, but it also meant there was no means of implementing a 'home' command which would reset the plotting position if an error occurred.  Limit switches were required in order to remove the need for manual intervention.

The controller had been housed in a separate box that included the power supply and a set of buttons for manual control. This meant that there was a short connection leading from the plotter base to the controller box, so replacing the whole box with a new one meant that wiring changes were minimal.  The manual control buttons were not implemented.

Controller

The replacement controller is an Arduino UNO with a CNC shield and two A4988 stepper driver modules installed.   The controller runs GRBL configured for a two-dimensional device (laser etching machine, or plotter). Everything is installed in a generic prototyping case with custom-printed front and rear panels.  Power is from an old IBM laptop PC power supply, at 18v nominal. The original motors were driven at 12v, but run quite happily at the higher voltage.  After some experimenting the current draw was set at 800mA - no information was available about the existing motors, so this was arrived at by noting the temperature rise under different conditions.  A linear regulator on a piece of perfboard drops the 18v to 9v for the Arduino. 

Limit Switches

X-Axis Limit SwitchLimit switches were added for the two axes.  The x-axis limit switch was straightforward, mounted on the frame at the end of the x-axis rail. The y-axis limit switch was more difficult, as it had to be mounted on the y-axis arm which moves horizontally.   A miniature limit switch was screwed in to the arm at the end of the car movement, and the wires led out the end of the arm and back up to the top of the arm, where they joined the pen solenoid wiring in a rolling half-loop that eventually got back to the controller.  The limit switches were SPST NO so shielded cable was used to connect them to the controller.

Note that GRBL configuration is quite flexible about the axis layouts, and a zero at top left is possible.  In this case the installation of the Y-axis end stop would be at the top of the moving arm, which would be somewhat simpler to implement.

The original multi-pin connector to the controller was used.  Because the CNC controller used a 4-wire connection to the motors, instead of the original 6 wires, there were spares available for running the limit switch signals.  Unfortunately it proved impossible to remove the pins from the motor side of the connector housing, so the new wires had to be soldered to flying leads instead of the neater solution of crimping to new pins. 

Pen Solenoid

Solenoid DiodeA diode was added across the solenoid leads where they attach to the frame to replace the diode that was part of the original controller.  A pair of 5w resistors drop the voltage for the pen solenoid - the preferable option would be to replace the solenoid with a higher-rated version, but the mount is unusual so a replacement is difficult to find.


 Pen Holder

The pen holder provided with the machine is only suitable for a very thin pen, which is difficult to find.  In order to enable usage of more commonly available pens new holders were created. The holder is attached with a pair of small neodymium magnets.   The two magnetic strips for holding the drawing sheet were supplemented with new strips (as used for magnetic pinboards) covered with self-sticking vinyl.

Panels

Controller PanelsThe Arduino USB connector is exposed at the front panel for connection to the PC. The power input socket is also exposed at the front panel, but is not used. (The only additional drain on the Arduino 5V is the logic supply for the two driver modules, and some smoothing capacitors on the CNC board).   A small LED shows the power-on state, and there are 3 NO momentary buttons for Hold, Resume and E_STOP. The mains power supply is via an IEC socket in the rear of the mains adapter that fits in a cutout in the back panel.

Software

Pen control was implemented using the Spindle Enable connection of the CNC shield, so 'M3' means pen down and 'M5' means pen up.  Note that this is controlled by Arduino pin 12, and will be labelled Z+ Limit Sw (or Z- Limit Sw - same thing) depending on your version of the CNC shield.

The most suitable utility for preparing images, creating GCode and sending to the plotter appears to be DeskProto.  It requires a custom device definition and a custom post-processor to properly handle the plotter.  This is easily done with a few small changes to any suitable similar plotter and postprocessor selected from the very extensive examples provided with the application, and once setup becomes the default for new projects. The utility used for Creality printers in laser mode is also very useful, especially for converting bitmap images - see CrealityWorkshop-en-2019-9-16.exe - Google Drive.  LaserGRBL is also worth looking at.


Implementing GRBL required a lot of testing and adjustments.  The final setting for the GRBL parameters are:

Settings and sample values Description
$0=10 Step pulse, microseconds
$1=10 Step idle delay, milliseconds
$2=0 Step port invert, mask
$3=0 Direction port invert, mask
$4=0 Step enable invert, boolean
$5=0 Limit pins invert, boolean
$6=0 Probe pin invert, boolean
$10=11 Status report, mask
$11=0.010 Junction deviation, mm
$12=0.002 Arc tolerance, mm
$13=0 Report inches, boolean
$20=1 Soft limits, boolean
$21=1 Hard limits, boolean
$22=1 Homing cycle, boolean
$23=3 Homing dir invert, mask
$24=12.000 Homing feed, mm/min
$25=2000.000 Homing seek, mm/min
$26=250 Homing debounce, milliseconds
$27=2.000 Homing pull-off, mm
$30=0 Max spindle speed, RPM
$31=0 Min spindle speed, RPM
$32=1 Laser mode, boolean
$100=20.100 X steps/mm
$101=20.000 Y steps/mm
$102=10.000 Z steps/mm
$110=3000.000 X Max rate, mm/min
$111=3000.000 Y Max rate, mm/min
$112=500.000 Z Max rate, mm/min
$120=30.000 X Acceleration, mm/sec^2
$121=30.000 Y Acceleration, mm/sec^2
$122=10.000 Z Acceleration, mm/sec^2
$130=350.000 X Max travel, mm
$131=245.000 Y Max travel, mm
$132=200.000 Z Max travel, mm

Note that there are additional settings in the code that are required for any particular setup.  Some of the above settings are dependent on the hardware.  For instance, the 'home' parameters needed quite a bit of juggling to correctly match the particular limit switches that were used. Note also the homing direction mask: this is set for limit switches at the bottom left of the platen.   If I was doing it again I would probably do them at top right. This would simplify the installation of the Y-axis limit switch and make the home position consistent with most CNC machines.