Customer can’t get PC and vinyl cutter to work.

The vinyl cutter is a KCut B24 (from Creation HK) and for now, its setup in plotter mode (ie its less dangerous to use a pen instead of a sharp blade).

I try the supplied driver CD, but connecting the plotters USB generates the XP new hardware wizard… The instructions say to “detect driver automatically”, but it doesn’t find the driver.

I can’t find the driver anywhere on the net… I eventually direct the new hardware to find the driver on the internet. It never seems to work when you need it, but this time, it finds a driver, installs it, and it seems to integrate into XP correctly.

I then see that the KCut USB is actually an FTDI USB to serial driver (ie it somehow treats USB as a serial device, where its given a COM port, and you can specify baud rates and handshaking options… Something  I last remember using about 10 years ago 😮

Anyway, I then install the supplied drawing/cutting software (ie a simple paint program, with plotter “drivers” for at print/cut time) Its called ArtCut, and it ain’t easy to use.

What makes things worse, is it only allows you to output drawings to: COM1, COM2, USB, LPT1

Of course, the KCut driver is configured at COM5 .

It should be simple to fix: control panel -> system -> hardware -> device manager -> ports -> USB serial port (COM5) -> right click -> properties -> port settings -> advanced -> pick a port number.

But since COM1 and COM2 were already in use, I moved COM1 to COM11, then COM5 to COM1

Now I configure artCut, but the plotter/cutter still wont budge.

The plotter is set for a baud rate of 19200… I try all sorts of combinations of baud rates and flow control… but without some proper documentation, I get nowhere.

I even connect up the plotter using a real serial port (the B24 has both a serial and USB ports), but I just can’t find the right setting.

I try some other cutter software applications from the net (shareware and free trials), like signgo and vistool, but they don’t work.

I signup with signcut X2, trying to get their free trial, but they just seem to ignore me…

After many hours, I eventually admit defeat.

Customer will look for other free trial software, and might yet get it going, but for me, I could no longer justify the time spent working on this.