Nice work guys! What was the final wiring you ended up with for the PWM? What was causing the grief the other day, was it the smoothie pinout?
I’m using inkscape at the moment. My bed is 300x200 so I’ve created a template in inkscape which I’ve attached. Keep in mind that the origin is the bottom left, so essentially you need to flip it before converting it.
For some sample gcode and my inkscape template you can find them here :
You can change the size of your template in mm by pressing ctrl+shift+d (Set the units to pixels) then saving the template somewhere safe. Place your designs in the bottom left which equates to the top left of the laser bed.
Secondly we would ideally have a biocide in the coolant, I’ve recommended we buy a bottle of PC nuke or similar antimicrobial agent and add a few drops to distilled water in the past, but water alone is what is currently installed. Interestedly enough the coolant that was installed did not have such an agent, only anti-corrosion, which we don’t really need as the lazer cutter side of the loop is entirely glass, so the pump should not have anything in the loop that would have a galvanic potential with its iron based construction.
The old coolant was completely removed and swapped with de-mineralised water many months ago. The old coolant did have an antimicrobial agent as well as anti-corrosion agent in it, but there were potential questions about its dielectric breakdown at high voltages. So just to eliminate the unknown of another potential variable for errors, we swapped back.
Btw, as some of you may have seen on the last few Tuesday nights the Laser Cutter is up and running again, thanks to a Smoothieboard and @Leon 's inkscape plugins.
We’re currently working on induction materials to idiotproof usage of it but should be running inductions again soon. Also, anyone who was inducted on the previous hardware setup will need to be re-inducted.
I’ve updated my laser repos to fix some minor errors in displaying error messages about paths and also a bug for floating point precision for smoothie gcode generation (Select smoothie in advanced)
There will be a sign going up shortly stressing how delicate the alignment is on the machine. Anyone leaning on the machine, closing the door too quickly, moving it around the room or nudging it will cause it to go out of alignment.
Given how much effort and time it takes to align this I will ask the executive to issue infractions for anyone who through willful ignorance causes it to go out of alignment from this point onwards. (Yes, this means excitedly opening and shutting the door, leaning on it, leaving things on top of it.)
Given the CNC routers are also in the next room I am investigating adding a ‘Hazardous Machines in Use’ warning light to the Fabrication Lab’s entrance and also a switched lockout so that members cannot walk into either room when either:
a) The laser cutter alignment is being corrected. I really really really don’t want anyone being injured by this thing.
b) The CNC routers are cutting harder materials than wood and so the bit may snap.
In less grumpy news, @Leon is amazing. Thank you for making your script work with the smoothieboard and for fixing the bugs we saw last night, as well as being around to help us muddle through them!
Are you locking the mirror nuts?
The only reason the alignment would be knocked so far out each time is if the screws arn’t locked after alignment completed.
I guess the next question is: Will it consistently run a job longer than
30 or 60 minutes…? that was the issue before… after a while the
thing starts to appear to “loose power” and whatnot, till it eventually
can’t barely cut anything at all…?
Just published an update which you guys will like for the Inkscape exporter plugin - The plugin now supports having the origin at the top left so you can design things and have them print out in the same orientation as they appear in inkscape.
Anything that isn’t a path will export as a raster - though smoothie doesn’t support raster yet so keep that in mind. Select your objects and choose Path->Convert to path