Constructing Janus, by Dirk

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Back in the saddle

Postby dirktheeng » Sun Sep 30, 2012 11:40 pm

Hi All,

It's hard to beleive that it has been so long since I have posted anything here. Back in Febuary, my wife and I decided to buy a house. We put in an offer on a house and was accepted. We were preparing to move but then the guy pulled some really aweful stuff which meant that we could not buy the place. We were in a rush to get another place as our lease was up. We found a great place and have now been in the house for a few months. In the process, I had packed up the laser so I had to quit. In the middle of all of this I got sick and was hospitalized multiple times and had to have surgery twice. When I got better, I had some work to do on the house and am just getting to the point of setting up the laser again. I am really looking forward to getting this going again!
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby dirktheeng » Sun Sep 30, 2012 11:48 pm

educa wrote:Did you get EMC working allready ?


I got it set up on the computer b/4 I had to pack it up to move, but I never got to the point of moving anything. The biggest thing I have to get done is put a hole in a block wall for a vent. I have a friend with the right tool to get this done and hope to do it soon.
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby sports.racer » Mon Oct 01, 2012 2:05 am

As long as your healthy!
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby educa » Mon Oct 01, 2012 5:33 am

Glad you're back.

By the way my emc2 adventure was also not that good so now I'm trying with an arduino on steroids, the 32 bits 80Mhz chipkit max. Looking promising.
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby dirktheeng » Mon Oct 01, 2012 10:22 pm

educa wrote:Glad you're back.

By the way my emc2 adventure was also not that good so now I'm trying with an arduino on steroids, the 32 bits 80Mhz chipkit max. Looking promising.


would you mind elaborating a little bit about what was difficult with emc2 and what you are doing with the chipkit max? I saw several posts about the beaglebone... is that what you are reffering to?
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby educa » Mon Oct 01, 2012 10:32 pm

in emc2 I got very strange behaviours while raster engraving, so I quckly gave up because sometimes a picture WAS and sometime was NOT engraved.

My purpose it to cut and raster engrave in the same job and somehow it always failed somewhere. I have a PC with a latency below 10000 which should be fantastic, but I got errors quite a lot.




Then I tried the beaglebone, but thats embedded linux and the biggest problem is that because of multitasking (not RTOS) you sometimes get breaks of +- 1ms which is totally unacceptable for steppers.
The beaglebone has also an onboard mcu called the PRUSS, but thats very badly documented.


And then you have chipkit, which is actually a 32 bits arduino at 80MHz which has plenty of power to fit my needs.
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby dirktheeng » Mon Oct 01, 2012 11:30 pm

Have you gotten any motion out of it yet?
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby dirktheeng » Mon Oct 01, 2012 11:37 pm

Have you seen "smoothie" yet? It looks exactly like what you want to do.

http://smoothieware.org/

I am very interested in this... It looks like they have made a LOT of progress. I plan on talking with the developer and finding out how they plan on implementing the engraving.
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby educa » Tue Oct 02, 2012 8:50 pm

Looks Nice Dirk.

I don't have yet a laser tube and actually I'm very confused right now what laser tube to buy.

I always wanted to buy a 80w RECI tube because everybody knows these are known to be among the best.


But.... it might be problematic for me.

The main stuff I'd like to cut is acrylig (upto 5mm) and plywood (upto 4mm)

80 Watt shoots through that like a piece of cake, but I found that a reci 80W laser beam seems to be allready around 6.9mm diameter when it leaves the tube and then with the divergence, it would go up to 11.9mm on my machine at farthest travel.


If I then look tha the specs of some 40Watt cheap tubes, then I suddenly see that these seem to have much narrower beams.


Can I ask you what tube you ue? Where you bought it and if you know any specs about its beam diameter/divergence ?
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Re: Constructing Janus, by Dirk

Postby dirktheeng » Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:17 pm

I got my tube from lovehappyshopping on ebay. I don't think they are around anymore or are under a different name. It is the same tube that most other people got when this started. I don't know the specs for that off hand. Beam divergence can be handled by a columnator... don't know how expensive one is for the infra-red optics though.
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