Ben's 2.x Laser Build

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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby BenJackson » Wed Jan 04, 2012 9:35 pm

sliptonic wrote:But I'm still wondering whether using G1/G0 to control laser on/off wouldn't be safer, more intuitive, and more broadly compatible with different g-code generators than using the Z position.

I don't think the nature of the move (G0 vs G1) is visible at the level you're talking about. I have also seen scripts that produce only G1 moves. (And obviously there are lots of other cutting moves like G2 and G3)

sliptonic wrote:My bed is completely manual right now, but I can imagine adding a stepper to allow for automatic touch-off focusing and maybe stepping down to change the focus on multiple passes but HeeksCNC doesn't do anything beyond 3 axis control.

It's unlikely that you'd try to CAM a touch-off like that anyway. Heeks doesn't need to support U if you just drive it in a text preamble.

As for focusing: That would be easier with Z but the 2.x Laser has too much wobble for that (if you jog the table while cutting your next pass won't line up).

All that said, you can have PPI and rastering without the "magic Z" and without moving the table axis to U. You just have to modify the HAL and INI. The git repo has all of my experiments so you can find the one where I moved the table to U to see exactly what I did. Disabling magic Z is even easier. The purpose of magic Z was to make your life easier: If it makes your life harder, don't use it! :)
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby Modelart » Thu Jan 05, 2012 12:24 am

BenJackson wrote:
Modelart wrote:Can you tell me how PP pins 14 and 17 are connected to PSU, for your setup?


Pin 14 ("PWM") goes to "input" in your diagram (labelled "IN" on my laser PSU). On Bart's board there's a jumper to select 14 vs 15.

Pin 17 ("laser-final") goes to TH I believe. That also happens on Bart's interface board so I'd have to double check, but I think TL is only the front panel test-fire button.

You can use the pot to set power and ignore pin 14 if you want. Bill French is doing that in his configuration. With PPI 100% power will be your usual choice (just reduced PPI) but you will still want to set it lower for things like paper.

For raster engraving you will need to turn the pot down because your laser probably can't move X fast enough to engrave at 100% power. For rastering you'll pick the highest X speed your laser is capable of and then set the depth of engraving with power.


Thanks Ben, is clear, i only have to change some values on hal and ini files to make it run for cutting, i think ppi made less charring and cut more fast in my setup! great thing, congrats for that.
Cant figure out why on raster engraving i only get some nice bar codes (with exact dimensions).... run emc from command line and i see it could load the image, wondering what could be... i made a bad png file?, have you some png file to test?, any clue about will be welcome!
EDIT: i figure that this happens when z is negative, for z positive, doesnt fire at all, im lost....
regards
Rick
Attachments
bar code.jpg
Last edited by Modelart on Thu Jan 05, 2012 1:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby bill.french » Thu Jan 05, 2012 12:36 am

Modelart wrote:i made a bad png file?, have you some png file to test?


It should genreate an "actual.png" file... look for that. It should be B&W and is what's actually engraved.
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby Modelart » Thu Jan 05, 2012 1:23 am

bill.french wrote:
Modelart wrote:i made a bad png file?, have you some png file to test?


It should genreate an "actual.png" file... look for that. It should be B&W and is what's actually engraved.


yeah, thats strange, genterate actual.png file, 1x1px blank(empty file) aprox 73bytes. I surelly missed something
thanks for come in Bill.
Regards
Rick
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby BenJackson » Thu Jan 05, 2012 1:57 am

Modelart wrote:EDIT: i figure that this happens when z is negative, for z positive, doesnt fire at all, im lost....

I noticed the lines connecting your engravings and suspected the same thing. With Z < 0 the laser is firing all the time, so when you raster it makes the stripes. One of the effects of PPM is that the laser doesn't fire when it's not moving (no distance is covered so no pulses fire). So likely you have Z<0 and whenever you move you make one pulse per mm (M3 S1). That's why you have 1mm spots connecting your engravings and stripes at 1mm in the field of the engraving.

Modelart wrote:yeah, thats strange, genterate actual.png file, 1x1px blank(empty file) aprox 73bytes. I surelly missed something

As Bill mentioned: Start emc from the command line (emc2 2x_Laser.ini) and you can see errors. I did not do much to make M144 user friendly. Possibly your image file is not found. It needs to be in the directory where you start EMC.
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby bill.french » Thu Jan 05, 2012 2:50 am

Modelart wrote:It needs to be in the directory where you start EMC

Actually i think it needs to be in the same folder as the M144/M145 files. Or maybe that's where i coincidentally started emc from... :-/
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby BenJackson » Thu Jan 05, 2012 6:22 am

I have pushed changes to github reflecting the issues people encountered:

Code: Select all
commit b00edf842f3df55d037a2d117ff4df14b2978cdc
Author: Ben Jackson <ben@ben.com>
Date:   Wed Jan 4 22:17:51 2012 -0800

    Add Tkinter GUI message boxes for M144 errors

    Any configuration errors will result in an error dialog.  Some
    startup code has been cleaned up.

    A new configuration [RASTER]IMAGE_PATH lets you specify where M144
    should search for images.  If the file cannot be found a warning
    dialog will be shown followed by a file selector to choose an
    alternate image.

commit 667dfe4c7159dcd5b7d4c95a1c205287fb484160
Author: Ben Jackson <ben@ben.com>
Date:   Tue Jan 3 20:56:43 2012 -0800

    Modify M144 for compatibility with [TRAJ]LINEAR_UNITS=inches configs

commit be80545e16fb526a106b3d572b00214c6b9ba90d
Author: Ben Jackson <ben@ben.com>
Date:   Tue Jan 3 00:10:07 2012 -0800

    Loop back the tool control signals so they are a no-op and M6
    does not hang EMC.
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby Modelart » Thu Jan 05, 2012 11:47 am

well, has to do again apt-get install / comp --install and it work flawlessly. I suppose something goes wrong first time.
I have this setup in an old pc, and have some memory problems on large images (ubuntu 8.04 lts), will try to stop axis backplot with (AXIS, stop) after work.
I still marvel how well PPI an raster implementation goes.
Theres any way to change scans direction from x to y, for non 2.x laser machines. I know how to do it inside emc2 (ie changing axis), but a parameter inside the o145 routine call would be great.
Thanks to all.
Regards
Rick
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby sliptonic » Thu Jan 05, 2012 1:54 pm

I got rastering working yesterday. Very very cool!. I had to uncomment the appropriate lines in the [FILTER] section of the .ini file.

If that's standard procedure, you might want to add a note in the README file.
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Re: Ben's 2.x Laser Build

Postby BenJackson » Thu Jan 05, 2012 5:42 pm

Modelart wrote:Theres any way to change scans direction from x to y, for non 2.x laser machines. I know how to do it inside emc2 (ie changing axis), but a parameter inside the o145 routine call would be great.

I tried to make [RASTER]AXIS set the engraving axis but there are some issues that make it difficult. The M144 script looks at that setting but the HAL doesn't. The HAL needs "xpos" changed to "ypos" in the raster section. For O145 I'd just copy it to O146 and flip X/Y.

If you want to be able to do either at runtime it would require more complex code in the HAL.

sliptonic wrote:I got rastering working yesterday. Very very cool!. I had to uncomment the appropriate lines in the [FILTER] section of the .ini file.

If that's standard procedure, you might want to add a note in the README file.


Hah! I specifically commented those out just before I pushed to github because they have nothing to do with my rastering code. If you literally used File|Open and selected an image (using the FILTER) then what you got was a program generated milling script. I guess it works because of the magic-z? Was the motion smooth?
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