Spencer Chase said, "This machine looks much more useful [than the
Cricut]." I looked at the web pages for the various Graphtec Imaging
Products. The CraftROBO is one of that company's cutter/plotter
machines, also sometimes known as "vinyl cutters" since they can cut
vinyl letters for signs. My only experience with cutters is with an
ancient small Roland device called a Stika, but this class of machines
can do amazing things.
The Graphtec model CE5000-40-CRP will cut 375 mm (14 inch) wide paper
in lengths of up to 30 meters. That covers a whole bunch of roll sizes.
It probably can not cut the thickness required for music books.
http://www.graphteccorp.com/imaging/ce5000/ce5000_specs.html
Mechanical resolution is said to be 0.005 mm, with repeatability
precision 0.1 mm or less per 2 m*1. That looks pretty good to me when
applied to paper rolls with a 250 mm width and 1 mm holes.
Graphtec has a variety of drivers available for Windows, ranging from
Windows 95 through 64-bit Windows 7. I would guess that that would
allow it to simply be used as a printer. If that is true, it might be
possible to use MIDIBoek to create roll images from MIDI files and then
"just print them" to the cutter.
With a price of about $1100, I'm not likely to buy one to experiment
with, but the CE5000-40-CRP and MIDIBoek combination could be a very
simple solution to the question of creating rolls for many instruments.
Wally Venable
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