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Building a control panel.....


gordon s
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I hope you're not suggesting GWR Green or LMS red?..........:D

 

I think I can export various file types in Templot. so will take a look at the best option. Still surprised and the prices quoted from Supersizeprint. I was doing it on iPad and may have had finger problems, so will check again after breakfast, but their top quality print on Dibond came in around £13....

 

I was wondering about the white background on Templot Sketchboard or other print software. Probably a daft question, but does that automatically print white?

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4 hours ago, gordon s said:

I was wondering about the white background on Templot Sketchboard or other print software. Probably a daft question, but does that automatically print white?

 

You'd have to ask the printers. Since they are printing on different materials and different colours, they probably can print white but maybe they can turn it on or off for different jobs?


Edit: To clarify, I thought the question was whether the printing process would actively print the white colour of a bitmap with a white background. Martin has interpreted the question differently below.

Edited by Harlequin
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5 hours ago, gordon s said:

I was wondering about the white background on Templot Sketchboard or other print software. Probably a daft question, but does that automatically print white?

 

 

Hi Gordon.

 

No, it assumes you are printing on white paper.

 

To print the actual white background, add a rectangle item with infill only, set the infill colour to white, resize it to the full page size, and send it to the back behind everything else.

 

PDFs exported from the sketchboard are bitmap images, set the resolution to 600 DPI unless it fails to export properly, in which case reduce it. It might be better to export a PNG file* instead of PDF.

 

(PDFs exported from the trackpad for template printing are vector files, except for any background picture shapes and sketchboard items which are bitmaps.)

 

Do everything in your power to create the export at exactly at the finished size. And make sure the print company know to set scaling=100% or none, even if it means a slight overlap of the metal panel (this is not the default setting, so be sure to tell them 3 times that's what you want).

 

*in which case set the bitmap width to 12000 (currently the max limit on the sketchboard). For a 2ft/600mm panel that will give an image resolution around 500 DPI.

 

2_040914_490000000.png

 

cheers,

 

Martin.

Edited by martin_wynne
screenshot added
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I must have missed something. Drew a rectangle, coloured it in white infill only, placed it over the diagram and then moved it to the back. Changed the settings as advised and saved the .png file. On screen everything was fine.

 

However, once saved I opened it in my normal image viewer and all I could see was a plain white page.....

 

Any ideas?

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Hi Gordon,

 

It's working fine here. Both in PDF and PNG. Did you click edit > send item to back, not push item backwards (which only goes back one step). When you did that, was the correct item selected?

 

How are you viewing it? If you view it in Templot the image is massive displayed full-size, you will need to move both scrollbars near the middle to see the actual content.

 

To see what you are doing more easily, I suggest sending it to the back before making it full page.

 

p.s. for PNG output you probably don't need to do this, it will have a white background anyway. Ask the printing company how they deal with PNG transparency, do they assume white is transparent? To avoid any problems, it might be better to make it very fractionally off-white. e.g. RGB colours 250,250,250.

 

cheers,

 

Martin.

Edited by martin_wynne
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12 minutes ago, martin_wynne said:

p.s. for PNG output you probably don't need to do this, it will have a white background anyway. Ask the printing company how they deal with PNG transparency, do they assume white is transparent? To avoid any problems, it might be better to make it very fractionally off-white. e.g. RGB colours 250,250,250.

That's what I was trying to say above.

 

 

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Thanks Martin

 

I selected item and to check it used 'bring item to front' and it made a plain white page. Selected item again and clicked edit - send item to back and the plan returned.

 

Saved the .png file and viewed in normal viewer. Plain white page. Tried viewing in Templot and scrolled all over the page, same result plain page.

 

I'll mail you the file via the Templot forum.

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I think I may have misread your post. Is the white background rectangle process only for a pdf file and not necessary for a png?

 

In which case it's my mistake as I've added the white rectangle and then saved it as a png file after moving the white rectangle to the back.

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3 minutes ago, gordon s said:

I think I may have misread your post. Is the white background rectangle process only for a pdf file and not necessary for a png?

 

In which case it's my mistake as I've added the white rectangle and then saved it as a png file after moving the white rectangle to the back.

 

Hi Gordon,

 

You haven't misread it. We need to know how the printing company deal with white backgrounds. They might:

 

1. buy in white panels to print on, leaving white parts of the image transparent.

 

2. spray paint it white first, and then ditto.

 

3. actually print the white as part of the image, using thermal ink or paint or whatever. Note that white ink is not available for ordinary inkjet printing on paper. :)

 

4. something else.

 

p.s. the sketchboard has a page colour setting:

 

sb_page_colour.png.bcefead61033dd4ef0af3b6ef1d8a639.png

 

Which probably means you don't need to do anything. But I can't remember how that deals with white, I need to go delving in Nils's code to find out.

 

If you set it to fractionally off-white, that will be all you need and you don't need to do anything else.

 

cheers,

 

Martin.

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Tried saving a pdf file and had the same result, so it must be something I have done within the file. Just posted it the Templot forum so you can see it first hand.

 

I send a pdf file to the printing company this morning and that checks out perfectly. It's only since I added the white rectangle that this has arisen.

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10000DPI? that will be a massive file and AFAIK there aren't any printers around that can handle that density of print - are you sure that is what you meant?

 

To ensure scaling is correct most printers look for the DPI to be at the native resolution with the most common being 300dpi, but sometimes 600 or 1200 will be used - though that is unusual with photographic prints generally printed at 300dpi.

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Going back a bit - if producing the entire panel in one go is too expensive / inflexible, might be worth emulating the real thing and building a panel as a series of tiles? Even if it's only cosmetic and there's just one monolithic wiring harness behind it.

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2 hours ago, BusDriverMan said:

......might be worth emulating the real thing and building a panel as a series of tiles? .......

 

Tiles ?

That rings a bell.........

 

 

j661jUkEzK05MGlFV5kjNmTUs2yeeuRYdSDbVGcp              images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRir0v_K6Uqe22_wMyku1L

 

  900_VM-5310.jpg          images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQfwcKzYNjKmPzBsHpObje    

 

 

uhlenbrock-69000-track-control-basis-set

Uhlenbrock_TrackControl.jpg  Uhlenbrock-Track-Control-Gleisbildstellp

 

maxresdefault.jpg

 

hqdefault.jpg

 

 

 

 

651601__xl.jpg

 

 

 

 

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11 minutes ago, BusDriverMan said:

Oh my gosh, that's adorable and also extremely cool.

 

Quite cool indeed.

For the typical UK based modeller, who's lived under a stone (in modelling terms) for the last 20 years, .....that's all old fashioned DCC stuff, dating from about 15 years ago.

Viessmann stopped making their GBS modular control panel system a few years ago, but Uhlenbrock still sell their Track-Control modular control panel system.

 

It looks to be quite fiddly to build the tiled panels and it's VERY expensive.

 

https://uhlenbrock.de/de_DE/produkte/trackcon/index.htm

 

 

 

 

 

.

Edited by Ron Ron Ron
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3 minutes ago, gordon s said:

Very interesting, not seen that before...

 

See my tongue in cheek, slightly sarky comment above Gordon........ :rolleyes:

 

I'm looking forward to reading your impressions on the panel.

Fingers crossed etc.

You'e my crash test dummy.  :D

 

 

.

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I'm trying to understand 'extended route settings' in the ECoS manual and it's 'doing my head in'.....:D

 

It would appear you can set up certain conditions to allow a route to be set and I've been trying for an hour or so setting various conditions which would prevent a route being set. One of those would be clicking on the platform led's before you are allowed to set the route. Not really what I wanted to achieve, but you never know what you can do if you don't try these things. Managed to set three or four conditions, but I can still set a route even with the conditions incorrectly set. 

 

Quite glad it's nearly bedtime and I'm golfing tomorrow as much more of this tonight and the whole bloomin' lot would have gone out the window.....:D

 

Make of this what you will...

 

http://www.esu.eu/en/support/tips-tricks/ECoS/erweiterte-fahrwegesteuerung/

 

Suddenly Martin's relays are becoming attractive....:drink_mini:

Edited by gordon s
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