After many years of lusting after laser cutter, and lots of researching, I lucked out and picked up a GCC Laserpro Mercury II (M-40W). I spent the first few weeks going through the exciting fun of clunky driver issues.
I’m Mac based, and being M1 based, can’t virtualise XP/7, though have tried an emulator with Win 7 but it can’t see the USB ports at the moment but it's too slow, and apps keeping locking up.
I’ve got an old XP laptop, but other than printing a PDF from Afinity Designer from Acrobat, I’m not finding many ways of getting artwork printed. It works, but turns out Acrobat has a vector bug and rasterises everything 🤦🏻♂️. Inkscape (the correct version for XP) crashes with the Mercury driver, so can’t even get that far. I’m going to setup a box with Win 7 as an interim and hopefully a newer version (again correct for Win 7) of Inkscape will work. After more research, discovered that all but Corel and Illustrator sends raster data (not vector nor mixed) to the driver.
I’ve tried modifying the driver to run on Windows 11, but hitting my head against an issue with Windows certificates, but have been able to install it in Test Mode. Pet project #1.
I’ve found some opensource code, and interesting info that indicates the machines use HPGL in a PCL wrapper. I don’t know if this is the older method (with “GCC Mode” as the USB support) or what?!
I’ve also just read something about USB modes being for 32/64-bit? Could someone clarify this? AFAIK it’s an old comms method vs new, and how the printer presents over USB?
Frustratingly, I’ve found software that will directly print to Mercury III machines, but not II. I’ve contacted the vendors, and had only one response so far.
Connected to my Mac, it shows up immediately as a printer, and I can add it with a Generic printer 😭. I’m contemplating building or modifying something to print directly from macOS, but probably will need a UI of some kind (or build a DIY printer plugin).
I’m at a loss as to why manufacturers won’t supply open drivers for industrial machines that clearly have longer lifespans than the time they can be bothered to write code for.
Is there anything I’ve missed? Any apps or tools etc that can get the machine running with a relatively recent computer/OS?
More updates to come...