Messages

1

Mach SDK plugin questions and answers. / Re: ART SOFT, IS IMPOSSIBLE HAVE A LASER WITH GRAYSCALE???.

« on: November 02, 2009, 05:22:35 PM »

I'm not quite sure what you are saying, but I have had a problem with the plugin too. I found it easier to just use the lazycam engraving and use the z direction pin to control the laser. I have a 25 watt synrad laser and it works pretty well.

2

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 and older Techno

« on: September 23, 2009, 08:48:52 PM »

I had the same problem with e-stops. My gantry uses steal wires and a fray was brushing against a limit switch. It ended up crashing my breakout board.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 and older Techno

« on: September 14, 2009, 09:41:49 PM »

Looks like you don't need a breakout board since it has some screw down terminals for limit switches. You probrably don't need a 5 volt power supply either. You'll need some resistors, which you can get at radio shack. Looks likes its a 2 amp motor, so get three 2k ohm resistors for the current set and solder the two little wires to pins 1 and 5 to your db9 solder cup connectors. Hope your db9 connectors are in the same pinout as the driver needs or your going to need to solder on the new ones that come with the driver. Looks like there's some writing underneath the wires. I cant see from the picture, but hopefully they say coil a b c d or something like that. Usually the white ones are not used. You can just cut the white ones and put some electrical tape around the ends. You should probrably ziptie or tape the four pairings of wires together and label them in case I'm wrong. Follow the pinout format of the driver and solder the motor wires to pins 6 7 8 and 9. Just follow the manual for the driver carefully for all the pinouts. Identify the power supply and hook it up to the screw down terminals 11 and 12. The motor hook up looks pretty simple to me. Your spindle might be a little complicated unless you know where the relay board is. Relays are just switches which turn your spindle on and off. If all else fails with the spindle, you might be able to just put a new 120 vac plug on it and plug it in and unplug it. Then just copy the parrallel port inf in the manual onto the Mach3 ports and pins configuration.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 and older Techno

« on: September 14, 2009, 04:12:02 PM »

I had a similar experiance with my table. It took me 3 months to figure out mach3 runs without a controller. Mach 3 turns your PC into a controller. Controllers are solid state and are usually meant to run on the specific program it came with. Mach3 is more universal. It works on step and direction pulses sent to your motor drivers. Do your steppers have 4 wires going into the controller or the motor drivers? If they go into the drivers they should have a couple wires going into it from your power supply aswell. One high voltage like 24 vdc and one low voltage 5 vdc. The step and direction pulses go from your driver into a breakout board which basically provides an interface between the parralel port cable and and the drivers and limit switches. It has a bunch of screw down ports on it where you strip and insert the wires. It should be labled what pin it goes to. then you program it into the Mach 3 software and calibrate it. All this is in the Mach 3 manual.

Alot of the older hardware is limited by its original software because computers weren't as flexible or powerful back then. You shouldn't have any problem finding drivers if your machine doesn't have any. 3 drivers will cost around $350-400. A breakout board is around $50. A new power supply is around $100. Thats really all you need unless your stepper motors are 5 wire. 6, and 8, wire motors work. You just don't use the extra wires.

5

General Mach Discussion / guide to raster laser engraving with a 5 volt gate, ttl, or relay using lazycam

« on: September 07, 2009, 07:41:33 PM »

To engrave with lazycam you need to set your desired 5 volt laser controller output pin to your z direction pin and your step pin to 0. Set your step pin to active high. Make sure you have no other output on for that pin and that your at the right focus depth before you change the z pins.

Load your image in your CAD program and convert it to a black and white bitmap: aka monochrome or 1bit. The quality of your black and white image will determine the quality of your engraving. You do this because you have no way of controling exactly when the laser will fire unless the pixels all have either an on value or an off value; black being on and white being off. If you don't do this before uploading, you'll have a whole mess of z values which is great for a router, but will not work for  this operation. The same holds true with jpegs for some reason. Stick to bitmap (.bmp) format.

Upload the image in lazycam and set the max depth to 0.001, as shallow as it goes. Any jump of z more than about .001 in either the positive or negative direction might cause your table to pause every time your laser fires. If Z values of -0.001 cause constant pauses in your engraving cycle, you might need to convert your image to greyscale and change the color black to a shade of grey. The shade will determine the z depth (i.e. 50% black will give you a depth of .0005, 90% will give you .0009). Make sure your z equals between -0.0003 and -0.001 to fire the laser. Valuesbetween -0.0001 and -0.0003 usually don't work. The x stepover rate in xy raster mode will also determine if you have a smooth or chopy cycle. The higher the x stepover rate, the slower you have to go.  At an x stepover rate of .01- 60% black gives me 90 ipm's and 100% black gives me 80 ipm's.

There are 4 ways this post proccessor can ruin your piece. Post the tap file with my post proccessor but do not send it to mach3 automatically. This post proccessor must be edited manually. Delete the last negative z value and save. If you don't, you will get a line underneath your engraving. If you load the tap file in mach3 and you haven't first jogged your z axis up, then your laser will trigger and stay on. If your z value is positive when you start the cycle, then your laser will trigger and stay on. If you abort in the middle of your cycle while the Z axis is in a negative value, then your laser will trigger and stay on. Always jog the z axis up and zero it before you load the gcode. Don't abort in the middle of the cycle unless you have some other way of turning off your laser. Pull the plug if you have too.

If your unsure of the maximum possible feedrate before it starts getting chopy, set your z pins to 0 and toggle the feedrate overide while it's runing the cycle.

This is only if you have a 5 volt relay, gate, or ttl to control your laser. If not then try the crapy laser engraving plugin.

Shoot me a message if you have problems.

6

General Mach Discussion / Re: db25 parallel v. serial pinout voltage

« on: July 18, 2009, 06:28:21 PM »

Would a serial port take the voltage?

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General Mach Discussion / db25 parallel v. serial pinout voltage

« on: July 17, 2009, 11:55:22 PM »

Hi. I've got a cnc laser from the late 80's and I'm trying to retrofit it to use mach3. What concerns me is the 12 volt pin. If I plug this into my parallel port will this voltage fry my mother board? The pinout is as follows:
MOVER-MPG Reference (1987-1990)
Signal H4 DB25F Pin 
Step1-5 
Step2-6 
Step3-7 
Step4-8 
Dir1-18 
Dir2-19 
Dir3-20 
Dir4-21 
Device0-Enable 9 
Device1-Enable 22 
+12V-11 
+5V-24 
Ground, Logic Common-13,25 
   
Signal H5 DB25M Pin 
Limit1-19 
Limit2-6 
Limit3-18 
Limit4-5 
Limit5-17 
Limit6-4 
Limit7-16 
Limit8-3 
+12V-14 
+5V-13 
Ground, Logic Common-1,12