Among other things, one of my first projects was to cut out some custom labels.
There’s a reason. I’m not saying this to get a reaction, it’s just a statement of fact: my father died back in September. We had an unfortunately acrimonious relationship based on insurmountable control issues. Doesn’t mean that I don’t miss him, but it does mean that there was some distance there.
Another thing: their house is a mess. Dad always pointed out that Mom was a hoarder (she is), and that was the problem—but after he died, I found out that Dad was also a hoarder. His office was a clutter of old equipment, which I kind of expected (he was a classical violinist, made his living tuning pianos, and was a bit of a technophobe) . . . but he saved hundreds of items. Windowed envelopes. Ancient magazines. Weird gadgets that he’d buy eight of. He still had a 1980s telephone system, plus spare batteries that date from the era (they are dead dead). A ton of unfiled paper in boxes. You get the idea.
So—I’ve been working on it. It’s been a daunting task, but I’m trying to get everything organized. Getting a bunch of it tossed is hard to do with mom around (“Why are you recycling these?” “Mom, they’re windowed envelopes that are formatted to fit one insurance company’s invoice format. You are never, ever going to use these.” “They’re perfectly good envelopes!” “They are, but you have at least a hundred unused normal envelopes just in Dad’s office.” But it’s too late by that point, because she’s mad and will fish through the recycling for weeks to make sure I haven’t thrown out anything else that’s somehow precious.)
So I have a need for labels. I bought a bunch of organization bins, and boxes suitable for papers, and file folders, and so on and so on. A lot of them. But I didn’t want to have to buy custom labels for each item—but I could buy some generic 4×6" Avery labels and cut out whatever I needed.
So that’s why I started doing.
I’m kind of unhappy with the results, though. While LLIS (IdeaStudio) orients the blade horizontally at the beginning of a job with a small cut at the top, it doesn’t orient the blade after that, leading to little snags whenever the blade needs to orient itself at the beginning of a new cut. Granted, I’m using the fine blade, which makes for small snags, but it seems like something I’d prefer to avoid.
The way to do that, of course, is to build in little orientation paths before you start each new path, like the one that LLIS does at the beginning of a job. So I started putting those in hoping it would help. I put the layers in a specific order so that the cuts would be made in a specific sequence, and took the time to minimize unnecessary movement and maximize smooth motion.
But LLIS seems to insist on dicing up the paths however it likes. That nice smooth path you put in? Now it’s two paths (with a snag). The blade-orientation cuts occur in random order, so they’re useless.
I’ve tried looking at the SVGs I import into LLIS, and I can see that the paths are in a specific order. I would understand it if they were reversed or something like that—I can reorder the layers in that case—but no, it seems to do them in random order, and often breaks them up in strange ways I don’t understand.
Another thing that became clear is that no matter how carefully I placed something on the mat, at precisely the position I designed for, LLIS would often start the job in the wrong place—not off by a millimeter or two, but on the order of ten of them. Its relative distances were pretty good after that, but with everything displaced by anywhere from 1/4–1/2", I eventually gave up. But you can’t put print-and-cut calibration marks on a 4×6" label.
Eventually, I printed a print-and-cut sheet with a rectangular cut-out in the middle of it, stuck the label onto the space in the cut-out at the right place, and I’m getting excellent results as far as placement goes now. I’m still not clear why the standard cuts are so far off, though. I need to do some more experimentation to see how large that cut-out in the middle can be.
So at least one issue solved for now. I like the flexibility on label size (there’s gonna be a lot of labeling around here), so I’m relieved about getting that to work, at least.
But the cut order . . . that’s annoying. Loklik provides no information about the internals of the iCraft, so I can’t send it custom commands. I’m half tempted to put together a USB sniffer and figure out the protocol to see if I could jigger it myself, but (a) that’d be kind of a pain in the patootie (however much it appeals to my inner geek), and (b) I’d rather that Loklik just fixed IdeaStudio to honor the user’s path choices, or at least provide the option to do so.
For these labels, at least, the snags don’t matter, and it’s not like I’m trying to churn these out by the hundreds for consumers, so I can live with it, but it certainly makes me hesitate to use it for fine lattices or things like that, especially as it’ll take significantly longer by doing the paths in an apparently random order.
I’ll also add that some of LLIS’s user-interface choices are . . . strange. If I’m putting in the X and Y positions of an item, for example, I can’t just use the Tab key to move to the next item—or rather, it can, but it acts like I didn’t enter the item I just left. Instead, I have to type Return and then Tab to move to the next item—and since I always forget that the first time, it becomes a repeated dangit.
I still don’t understand why the connection to the iCraft drops so frequently. Or rather, I’d understand it if I were connected via WiFi or Bluetooth (even though it’s only about four feet from the router and computer), but it’s connected via a USB cable, and so I don’t really get how it forgets that so often.
In all, though, I look forward to trying to find solutions to these issues (if I possibly can), or for updates to LLIS that fix some of these issues. I’d even consider contributing code, but LLIS isn’t an open-source project, and I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with the right people at any rate.
Ah, well. I persist.
