This is exactly what I was looking for.
After searching on ebay for the HP 7550/7475a i noticed they are generally only available in the US. Since the shipping costs and import duties to the EU are really high for US-ebay products and most of them did not guarantee it would work I started looking into alternatives.
So I tried my luck on the 'Drawing Machines'...
But they are (in my opinion) very slow, suffer from the same 'do your own maintenance/support' like current 3D printers and brands like AxiDraw, Eleksmaker or Mackerblocks are crazy expensive compared to the 3D printers which contain much more electronics and material.
Also looking into their 'boards' I noticed they use different firmwares and mostly leaned on SVG/Inkscape/Python and i'd rather have the HP-GL to mess around instead of getting lost into this firmware/library rabbit hole.
Then I stumbled on the Silhouet Curio while looking through youtube videos. It has so many options.. whole 'home' businesses are build around this device.
Looking closer into the electronics I noticed it uses a proprietary language/driver.
However it does have a small active tech community that was able to reverse engineer the protocol and created an Inkscape plugin.. but that will make it on par with the drawing machines, and I'd rather have a documented protocol from the get go (like HP-GL).
I almost gave up on my dream of owning a plotter and tinkering with fractals and the HP-GL on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Until I decided to read this thread that started it all once again and read your comment about the USCutter, this thing is exactly the right price and seems to actually use HP-GL, awesome, my search continues.
So I tried my luck on the 'Drawing Machines'... But they are (in my opinion) very slow, suffer from the same 'do your own maintenance/support' like current 3D printers and brands like AxiDraw, Eleksmaker or Mackerblocks are crazy expensive compared to the 3D printers which contain much more electronics and material.
Also looking into their 'boards' I noticed they use different firmwares and mostly leaned on SVG/Inkscape/Python and i'd rather have the HP-GL to mess around instead of getting lost into this firmware/library rabbit hole.
Then I stumbled on the Silhouet Curio while looking through youtube videos. It has so many options.. whole 'home' businesses are build around this device. Looking closer into the electronics I noticed it uses a proprietary language/driver. However it does have a small active tech community that was able to reverse engineer the protocol and created an Inkscape plugin.. but that will make it on par with the drawing machines, and I'd rather have a documented protocol from the get go (like HP-GL).
I almost gave up on my dream of owning a plotter and tinkering with fractals and the HP-GL on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Until I decided to read this thread that started it all once again and read your comment about the USCutter, this thing is exactly the right price and seems to actually use HP-GL, awesome, my search continues.