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View Full Version : Epilog Radius Print Driver and missing vector line problems. Help!!!



christine park
12-19-2011, 4:19 AM
Hello,
I just purchased an used Epilog Radius 25Watt. I downloaded and installed
the driver from the epilog website.
http://www.epiloglaser.com/downloads_radius.htm
unzipped it and followed the instruction in my manual to install the
driver. And I ran into 2 major problems.

Problem #1:
When I click on print from illustrator CS3 (running on Windows XP) I don't get the
Epilog laser setup print window. I just get the normal print window of
illustrator.
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So I just clicked on "Setup..." at the lower left corner of
the print dialog window. Another print window pops up where you can select
different printers.
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From there I click on "preferences." I am able
to change speed, power and some of the settings
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But there's no options for assigning which colors to raster and which colors to vector. Plus, I don't want to go through so many windows to change the settings to print.

Problem #2:

When I vector cut, one side of the shape will be uncut/missing. For example, when I tried cutting a square the left line of the square didn't cut. When I tried cutting a hexagon lower left line didn't cut. When I tried cutting a circle it didn't complete the circle. Small section of the bottom of the circle was uncut. So I tried cutting 2 hexagons side by side as one file. It skipped cutting the lower left lines of both of the hexagons.

Please help! I was so hoping that when I set up my laser I wouldn't have any problems...I was afraid of this :(

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions.

Christine Park

Russ Shoe
12-19-2011, 11:28 AM
Hi,

We have the exact laser, as far as printing goes, you can always set the radius as the default printer in windows, one less thing to go thru. Its usually a good idea to have a dedicated computer for your laser, then the radius would be the only "printer" hooked up to it. As far as color coding, the only thing you can do is color map is vectors, which we have never done, not something we have needed. The missing lines......hmmmmmm make sure your print settings match the paper size, the radius is picky on that. It also seems like that the laser is skipping on the lower left on everything, could be a focus issue, the table could be off. Power and rate for vectoring could affect the cutting. All i can think of right now....

Ed Maloney
12-19-2011, 1:16 PM
Could you post the file so we can take a look at it?

Ed

Martin Boekers
12-19-2011, 3:35 PM
Remember there is always Epilog tech support. So far I don't believe they charge for the service.
They always have been helpful. Also you can ask them for a history on your laser. They should be
able to give you why and when it has been serviced.

christine park
12-20-2011, 12:37 AM
There's no file to upload. I just created a square in illustrator CS3, changed the stoke to .001 made the inside color of the square to be clear, made sure it was in RGB mode, made sure my stroke was 100% black and then print. Then i closed the file w/o saving.

christine park
12-20-2011, 12:42 AM
Thank you for your suggestions.
I do have my laser set as my default printer. The computer is dedicated for laser use only.
Do you also have the 25 Watt? Can you suggest the power and speed for vectoring regular paper?
Is there a chart online for power and speed guidelines for different materials? My manual does not have the guideline for paper or funfoam which i will be cutting.
Thank you!

David Fairfield
12-20-2011, 7:35 AM
I see you are using Adobe Illustrator, and it looks to me like you are using an older driver. The old driver and Adobe were basically incompatible, I experienced many odd problems until the newest driver came out. Can you download and use the lastest one? Its much better than the old one and should cost you nothing.

HTH
Dave

Russ Shoe
12-20-2011, 12:17 PM
The radius i think starts out as a 25w machine, ours was listed as a 30w, its probably close to that.

"changed the stoke to .001 made the inside color of the square to be clear, made sure it was in RGB mode, made sure my stroke was 100% black and then print"

This sounds strange to me, we use Corel X3 and Photoshop CS2, im sure its a Illustrator thing.

As far as I know, vetoring must be a hairline, dont know if .001 is seen by the laser as a hairline? im grasping here

You have the correct drivers from Epilog, there are only 2, one for windows 98 and one for anything later.

Paper and that foam should be fast and as low as power you can, (it will char easy),that will depend on how many sheets you are cutting at once, 1 sheet, never have done that, however we have cut a sticky-back poster-board material, I think we vectored it at 80s 50p and rate at 100%, it worked for what we were doing, those settings could be tweaked too

We use the configuration settings in the bottom options alot. once we have found the sweet spot for settings, we save it for that job, it saves as a .dat file, so we just load that if we are doing the same job later.

you could try to move the "home" on your laser, and try it again, see if it would work somewhere else on the laser bed, might eliminate some questions on the mechanics of the laser.

David Fairfield
12-20-2011, 7:56 PM
Christine please let us know if / how you resolved the problem. If its an Adobe issue you can switch to Corel, or you can try some of the workarounds I developed which helped a lot. You can search the forum for that. But the new Epilog driver makes it unnecessary, works perfectly with Adobe.
Dave

christine park
12-22-2011, 1:37 AM
Thanks everyone for all your advise. As someone of you mentioned it seemed like Radius just does not like Adobe. I installed the 30day trial version of Corel and it worked! all sections cut!! However Corel keeps giving me warning pop up window every few sec that says, " Encountered an improper argument."
Anyone know what that is about?

Thank you.