Voyager keyboard overlays

[brouhaha]

I wanted to make some Voyager keyboard overlays, similar to what Eric Rechlin has made for WP-34s etc. Eric has been generous with advice on overlay making. I use a Silhouette Cameo 4 CNC cutter, and Silhouette brand printable vinyl sheets. These particular vinyl sheets are probably not the best material for a real overlay, because the adhesive is fairly weak (probably intended to be easily removable) but I'll search for better material later.

Anyhow, after taking measurements from a 2400 DPI scan of an old 12C, I wrote a C++ program to generate a PDF file with the cutting paths. I can get four overlays on one US A-size (8.5 x 11.0 inch) sheet. It might be possible to get six per sheet by rotating them 90 degrees, but I'm not sure if there will be enough room in the available cutting area when feeding sheet stock with no cutting mat.

I'm not yet actually printing anything on the overlays. I just wanted to do a fit check. I tried #20 bond copy paper first, but even with a low-tack cutting mat, it curls too much on removal from the mat to be very useful, so I proceeded to cutting vinyl.

photos

The photos show my first cut (literally) at the vinyl overlay. One photo shows just the unapplied overlay sitting on a desk, and the other shows it applied to an actual 12C (a Chinese-made singe-coin-cell variant). I cut a second and put it on a Singapore 1994-made button cell variant, and the fit is the same. It's possible that some fine tuning should be done.

For a different project, I've printed on the vinyl with an HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 inkjet printer, and then cut with the an old Silhouette Portrait. It was very tricky to get the print and cut aligned, which is why I've switched to a Cameo 4, which can detect alignment marks in the printing. Unfortunately even with the alignment marks, I found that the alignment is very good at the top of the page, and gets progressively worse toward the bottom of the page, ending up off by around 2 to 3 mm. I'm wondering whether my printer has an inaccurate Y axis, or the cutter does.

The vinyl will either need some spray coating, or to be laminated, in order to protect the printed legends.

I'll probably try to make overlays for the DM12L etc. later.

I'm fed up with HP inkjet printers and the various tactics HP has used to lock people into their ink cartridges and more recently, into ink subscriptions. While I have only used genuine HP ink in my printer, I've had enough hassles that I'm seriously considering switching to an Epson EcoTank printer. The cheapest one sold for "home & small office" uses all dye inks, and the rest in that category use dye for colors and pigment for black. I really want pigment for all the ink, and for that you have to buy the rather more expensive "business" printers. But given how much cheaper the Epson ink is than HP ink, I think it will be worth it.

[Chr Yoko]

Nice !
I am using at home an Epson Ecotank for some years now and will never get back to HP printers : It is so cheap to operate that i do not even bother buying compatible ink bottles. Genuine are fine and economical. Only important point is to print regularly or the ink might dry somewhere. That never happened to me as it is the family printer with a student at home printing tons of materials almost daily.
I used it also to print HP calculators manuals on thicker paper. Not perfect quality but OK to me.

Except that my company work printer is an HP Color Laserjet Pro MFP M283fdw that is again "playing games" when using compatible laser powder cartridges since the genuine ones are super-duper expensive. Therefore, the print quality is now crap by HP intention : They do not forbid anymore those, but lower the print quality on purpose after a while.
My previous jet printer HP never saw any genuine cartridges besides the test ones. But at its 10 years anniversary, it suddenly stopped working. A clear firmware lock as it was printing perfectly fine the day before.
So , yes, HP is playing with its customers, so the best for me is not be anymore an HP customer.

[brouhaha]

(06-06-2023 12:06 PM)Chr Yoko Wrote:  Except that my company work printer is an HP Color Laserjet Pro MFP M283fdw

I have one of those too, and use genuine HP toner in it. It works fine, but the vinyl overlays have to be printed on an inkjet.

[brouhaha]

The SwissMicros keyboard geometry (key sizes and key spacing) are not actually the same as the HP Voyager calculators. I used the same process to make an overlay for a DM12L. Still haven't got any printing, just another fit check.

photo

[agarza]

I have tried making overlays with laser printers (both Brother and HP) and the quality is really poor.

I also tried an Epson EcoTank printer. However, the print heads became clogged. I tried to clean them with isopropyl an later with commercially available solutions with no luck. It is now gathering dust.

As for the cutting process, I utilized a silhouette cutter, but the software provided for Mac is completley useless. So I ended using Windows. But it is so hard to get the cuts right.

I ended going to a local print shop and they did an excellent job of printing and cutting!

They printed on a Vinyl Sticker, laminated it and later was cut.
This way the ink does not wear out. image

[mfleming]

(06-06-2023 07:50 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  I found that the alignment is very good at the top of the page, and gets progressively worse toward the bottom of the page, ending up off by around 2 to 3 mm. I'm wondering whether my printer has an inaccurate Y axis, or the cutter does.

I tried years ago making multiple 41 overlays on a single heavy cardstock page using a Cricut cutter and encountered the same cumulative error. I duplicated the original design file then deleted all but one overlay in each copy. Each file could be run successively to cut all overlays to reduce error.

(06-06-2023 07:50 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  I've had enough hassles that I'm seriously considering switching to an Epson EcoTank printer.

I have a similar Brother tank style inkjet that survived six months in a mover's storage warehouse followed by a cross-country trip in a moving van. It only required a couple of nozzle cleaning passes to print like brand new. Highly recommended.

It might be helpful to distinguish between a keyboard overlay and keyboard stickers. An overlay masks the faceplate markings with replacement markings, and may or may not be used permanently. Michael Fehlhammer offered quality HP-41 cardstock overlays that I believe were die cut. He described the production process in a thread sometime in 2016/2017. Hopefully the C47 overlay project will be successful and be practical for other projects.

Keyboard stickers like Eric's mask both the faceplate and keycaps, and are intended to be permanent. I've seen such stickers for full-sized typing keyboards and believe they too are die cut. They are advertised for long term use, so they probably use an impress style printing (as opposed to spray-on). Might be worthwhile seeing what these companies can offer.

Somewhere in between might be a commercial printshop for the overlay/sticker blank and a cutter that's a step above a hobbyist unit.

~Mark

[John Ioannidis]

(06-06-2023 07:50 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  ...

Anyhow, after taking measurements from a 2400 DPI scan of an old 12C, I wrote a C++ program to generate a PDF file with the cutting paths.

tsk tsk tsk... what was wrong with writing it in pure postscript?

(if I had a car, my bumper sticker would be "/PS ❤️ {honk} if" )

[brouhaha]

(06-11-2023 06:44 PM)John Ioannidis Wrote:  what was wrong with writing it in pure postscript?

I considered it. There's nothing's wrong with it. However,
* It's been 35 years since I wrote any Postscript code.
* I have a reasonably good debugger for C++.
* If I eventually publish the code, it's easier for most people to use C++ source code.

[Divasson]

An alternative overlay, made in silicone.

Some changes in labels still required!

   

   

(For some reason I cannot keep the rotation I did to the pictures)

[Harald]

(06-28-2023 06:09 PM)Divasson Wrote:  An alternative overlay, made in silicone.

Some changes in labels still required!





(For some reason I cannot keep the rotation I did to the pictures)

That looks promising! What do the key presses feel like with the overlay? I think I would cover the "on" and "enter" keys as well. Just like odd when they are different.

[ijabbott]

(06-28-2023 06:09 PM)Divasson Wrote:  (For some reason I cannot keep the rotation I did to the pictures)

I guess the thumbnails ignore the any orientation specified in the original JPEG file's EXIF header. You can think of the orientation in the EXIF header as a hint to tell software how to orient the image data for display. There are free command-line tools to losslessly rotate the JPEG image data according to the orientation in the EXIF header and reset the orientation in the EXIF header to 0 in the resulting file.

[Steve Simpkin]

(06-28-2023 06:09 PM)Divasson Wrote:  An alternative overlay, made in silicone.
Some changes in labels still required!
(For some reason I cannot keep the rotation I did to the pictures)

Divasson,
Am I understanding that you need these labels because you can reflash a HP-12C into a HP-16C?

[Divasson]

The latest Voyagers can be flashed through the POGO connector, and there are several firmwares circulating (you can search for them in several threads from not too long ago). If you had the original POGO cable, there are a couple of mods to be done to it because the newest calculators use the USB protocol with a different connection scheme (with respect to the 2007 HP12c+, that is)

In this thread there is a discussion about enhancing the original HP16c firmware:

https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-19458.html

It is good to still have a beautiful platform that can be modified extensively, for which there are programming tools and now the possibility of overlays.

[Didier Lachieze]

(06-28-2023 06:09 PM)Divasson Wrote:  An alternative overlay, made in silicone.

Some changes in labels still required!

Amazing overlay ! I’m wondering how the printing of the key legends is done, specially for the blue legends on the the slanted side of the keys.

[grbrum]

Do you think it would be possible to flash something like a HP41 to it? Same number of keys.

(06-28-2023 09:29 PM)Divasson Wrote:  The latest Voyagers can be flashed through the POGO connector, and there are several firmwares circulating (you can search for them in several threads from not too long ago). If you had the original POGO cable, there are a couple of mods to be done to it because the newest calculators use the USB protocol with a different connection scheme (with respect to the 2007 HP12c+, that is)

In this thread there is a discussion about enhancing the original HP16c firmware:

https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-19458.html

It is good to still have a beautiful platform that can be modified extensively, for which there are programming tools and now the possibility of overlays.

[ctrclckws]

(06-29-2023 08:21 AM)grbrum Wrote:  Do you think it would be possible to flash something like a HP41 to it? Same number of keys.

In a way, this has been done, look at the DM41 and DM41L models from Swissmicros.
Due to the mapping of a portrait keyboard to a landscape layout, it can be a little harder to work with.

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(06-29-2023 09:02 AM)ctrclckws Wrote:  

(06-29-2023 08:21 AM)grbrum Wrote:  Do you think it would be possible to flash something like a HP41 to it? Same number of keys.

In a way, this has been done, look at the DM41 and DM41L models from Swissmicros.
Due to the mapping of a portrait keyboard to a landscape layout, it can be a little harder to work with.

Quite so, like on those DM models, keymapping would be a mess.
Furthermore you won't have ALPHA support on Voyagers' display.