Messages

1

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: The Laser Project.

« on: August 30, 2011, 11:57:33 PM »

Are you using the Gold Method photoshop plugin?

2

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: The Laser Project.

« on: August 16, 2011, 12:03:31 AM »

something's weird - it's not letting me post again for some reason.  Going to give it one more shot.

Anyhow - fired up the rotational engraving attachment this afternoon, and put a Newcastle logo on a glass.  The logo is about 3" tall.  It's much more detailed in person than it is in this picture, the skyline in the star and the borders on the letters all stand out.  Pretty cool stuff.  Used the engraving plugin to do it.

3

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Finally going to drop some pictures....

« on: August 15, 2011, 04:24:50 PM »

Tweakie - I know I've been saying I'm going to post things, and it's taken me forever.  I'm usually farting around on my laser trying to figure out the best feeds / speeds for everything instead of taking pictures of stuff...   Sorry about that.

Anyhow - here's two small things I've done.  the picture of my boy running actually looks a lot better in person than it does in the picture.  Also, balsa seems to be a horrible wood to engrave in - it's so grainy.  It produces some pretty nice contrast though.  It was done at 375 in/min (10,000 mm/min) at about 22% power, which was probably set a little too high.



The second image was some text I engraved into some scrap acrylic I had lying around.  Same settings, basically, but bumped laser power up to about 50%.  Came out good.  I did start finding out that I really need to turn off my air assist when I'm engraving, it condenses the acrylic vapors and leaves a fine powder all over the rest of the engraving, which ends up leaving a ghosting effect around the letters, all in the same direction, since the air is blowing out of the nozzle.  Once I turned the air assist off, the problem went away.  I also noticed that when I'm engraving in beechwood that I was having the same issue.  Although, not leaving the air assist on led to the dust collecting all over the print and staining the really light areas when I brushed it off.  I might actually make a two-way air assist for my laser, one that blows out, and one that vacuums.

4

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: The Laser Project.

« on: August 02, 2011, 06:12:49 PM »

Testing the new version of the plugin now Tweakie.   I rebuilt my laser this weekend, added a few things, tweaked things, etc. etc. etc.  I'll shoot up some pictures of my results when I'm done.

Thanks for doing this!  I love this plugin!

5

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: The Laser Project.

« on: June 26, 2011, 11:37:22 PM »

So I received my 10 turn pot, and installed the digital volt meter.

Man, what a difference.

I am now able to repeat just about anything using the volt meter.  So much better.  Plus, the 10 turn pot really allows some fine control over laser power.  My laser is now much more functional.

I'll post some pictures of some of the engraving I've been doing using your plugin modifications.

Thanks Tweakie!

6

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: The Laser Project.

« on: June 23, 2011, 03:31:45 PM »

So one of the things I'm going to give a shot to help with making engraving using the plugin a little more consistent is adding a digital volt meter that reads the input signal to the laser.  That will at least let me know what's going on instead of just relying on the scribe mark on the knob of the pot.

I'm also looking at getting a multi-turn pot that will hopefully allow for finer adjustment of the voltage signal to the laser as well.  Right now the one that I have is fairly rough, and has quite a bit of 'backlash' if there is even such a thing in pots.

I should have all of it installed by next Friday, I'll let you know how it goes.

Also - that picture of the engraved egg is pretty amazing.  Ingenious!

7

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: The Laser Project.

« on: June 22, 2011, 02:50:59 PM »

Hey there Tweakie -

I've actually been using the plugin since completing my own laser a week or so ago - and I have to say, thank you very much for the changes that you made.  They work great.

In general, I've found the plugin to work great.  Took a couple of passes to figure it out, but it's simple, and does the trick. 

My only problem with it is more a problem with my own laser and it's design.  I'm using a pot to control the 0-5 volt signal to my laser power supply, and unfortunately I don't have a display showing me the current voltage that I'm sending, which makes repeating my past successes challenging.  When I get it right though, it's pretty amazing.

The only bummer is, I will also probably end up using a third party control card, such as the RetinaEngrave or something similar.  I would like to combine some vector and raster work into single pieces with varying power levels, and while I can get it working using a couple of different steps in Mach3, it's just not to the level of simplicity and replication that I need in a hobby laser.  Well, the combination of the two, at least.  The actual vector and raster operations individually are a snap.

I will continue to use this plugin for small runs that I have, it works great.  And I like that it doesn't require any other external software.  It's really pretty cool!

Thanks again for keeping this going!