Nice! What is the physical/electrical connection? Serial, parallel, etc.? If serial, did you have any problems with opening ports? On which VM?
Bill ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Pavel Krivanek [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 9:47 AM To: Pharo Development Subject: [Pharo-project] Pharo and an old plotter Hi, I would like to mention one funny usage of Pharo. I have got an old simple czech plotter from 1989 named XY4150. It is no secret that the interactive environment of Smalltalk is ideal for controlling such machines because it is very easy to send commands to it and experiment with drawing capabilities. Even today such old hardware can find a real-life production deployment. I currently use it to write owner names to plastic cards with pre-printed bar codes by a special pen destined to sign credit cards :-) It is controlled by Arduino however LPT can be used too. Btw. there was several interesting czech plotters. The most interesting one was named Merkur Alfi. It was a construction set for children with two stepper motors and one relay. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUmFYzyL9eo And they started to sell it recently again so if you are looking for some cool hardware for your children, you can look here: http://www.merkurtoys.cz/vyrobky/plotrovy-zapisovac-alfi-z-merkuru[1] But it's about 139€ so it's quite expensive... Cheers, -- Pavel
