I have a question about the pattern design.
I want to design a pattern with thousands of the same feature (eg. an array of thousands of dots ), and I was taught to draw them one by one in InkCAD. It will take much time to finish this job. So I am writing to ask whether there are some shortcuts, such as Copy, Paste, in the software system. If there is, how can I do that? (I tried to find these function in menu, but failed.)
I really appreciate it if you could help me to figure it out.
Looking forward to the response.....
My name is Al Smetana I am an Applications Engineer at Nanoink. We have a function in InkCAD that will serve your purposes well. It is called “Lattice Generator” and is an icon on the InkCAD window which looks like 10 dots in an array. There is a more thorough description in the user’s manual on pages 219-222. The default array of dots contains 400 dots, but can easily be expanded to over 6000.
Settings that will help this will be to expand the area of the 90 x 90 micron scan range that the dot lattice will fill.
This can be accomplished in the boundary coordinates section by changing the values to:
X Min: -40 Y Max: 40
Y min: -40 Y Max: 40
Also the spacing between to dots can be manipulated by changing the vector values in the lattice section. The dot spacing is defined by two vectors one for spacing in the X and one for the Y axis. Values of 0.5 or 0.2 from the default values will make for more dots in closer proximity.
A second parameter that adjusts spacing between dots is called “scaling”. Here you can change the distance between the dots with a value lower than 1 will allow for more dots in the array. For example a value of 0.5 will reduce the spacing between the dots by half.
Of course with multiple pens the arrays can be drawn much faster. The extreme limit to this is the 2D nanoprint array which prints with 55,000 tips. This may be overkill for just a few thousand dots though.
Thanks for your question we will post it anonymously on the DPN forum which has some general questions from our users and troubleshooting tips.
Have a good day,
Al Smetana
Applications and service Engineer
Nanoink Inc.
Skokie IL, 60077
Office: 847-329-2972
Cell:847-387-9679
asmetana@nanoink.net