Digital BW, The Print

- A vacuum bed that would take a single sheet of paper of any
thickness, texture, or size (depending on needs). Allow that paper to
be pin-registerable, either for re-printing on the same printer, or in
cooperation with other printmaking techniques like letterpress or
intaglio. (Maybe a roll adaptor could allow for rolls to be used, but
the prime "platform" would be a single sheet of paper.)

Yes!  This is what I've wanted from the start!

A 2D cross-arm plotter system that would accurately move the head
assembly to any X,Y point on the paper. It doesn't have to print from
top to bottom like a regular roll-feed printer, but instead could take
advantage of going backwards to do things like overprinting.

Yep. See the open-source 3d printer. Similar but in xyz. The problem  
would be to get everything constantly aligned to within 1440th of an  
inch.

- A head assembly that's mounted above the cross-arms. It could take
a number of heads: perhaps a simple 2- or 3-channel head for a simple
B&W inkset, or multiple heads to do a complex B&W/color/GLOP/etc.
inkset.

Yes. And if a somehow we standardized the mount, it would become  
industry-wide.

- A flexible ink-supply system, either based on cartridges, bottles,
or any other source.

What about using knowledge from the medical industry and IV bags? They  
seem to have figured out the fluid flow stuff with nearly zero clog  
issues. They would have to. People die otherwise.

- A small computer that acts as a simple controller for the vacuum
bed control, plotter, and heads. This could be a basic single-board
microcontroller setup, either an Arduino board or a small Linux
system; it would have an Ethernet or WiFi controller aboard to
communicate with the host software.

Yeah. The key is to standardize this part and make it modular so  
people can attach add-on control boards for things like roter cutters,  
double printing, etc.

- Software that runs on your desktop/laptop that communicates with
the printer computer. This could be simply a printer driver (ala QTR
on the Mac), or it could be a standalone program that would read image
files and then generate the commands to cause it to print. The
important part here is that all parameters of the printer are
accessible and programmable: ink setup, cleaning/flushing techniques,
dithering patterns, head channel, head position (X/Y on the plotter
bed), and so on.

Yeah. And we would need to create a standardized LUT editor software/ 
workflow for X print-head. Way complicated.

All the old Epson heads are out there (but rare), but we need good  
ones. Using multiples . . . gets complicated. hmm.

Walker




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