Messages

1331

LazyTurn / Re: LazyTurn

« on: February 13, 2008, 03:15:09 PM »

good idea.. Ill look into doing both. Not sure I understood the comment on the Z ruler changing when stock chnages, nothign shoudl happen to it unless you reset the Z start.. But I do like the triangles being draggable thing with standard sizes being allowed. Perhaps a double click to enter a diamter, and a drag that click from size to size for standard stock diamters. OF course I havent a clue whats standard, but I imagine thats easily looked up...

Art

1332

LazyTurn / Re: LazyTurn

« on: February 13, 2008, 02:24:46 PM »

Kiran:

 Thanks. Alreay noted here. Im going to place the numbers in their own little box for clarity.. Nice to hear form you by the way,

Art

1333

LazyTurn / Re: LazyTurn

« on: February 13, 2008, 02:23:29 PM »

BTW:

 Make sure you have the latest lazycaminstalled. Use the lazycam standalone download link if you like..

Art

1334

LazyTurn / Re: LazyTurn

« on: February 13, 2008, 02:22:52 PM »

Steve:

 You need to have LCam installed. And the program needs to be in your Mach3 folder to test it..

Art

1335

LazyTurn / Re: LazyTurn

« on: February 13, 2008, 12:52:19 PM »

Hi Guys:

 OK, heres the program, as well as a screen shot of progress to date. In the phot you can see I have loaded a profile, ( any profile must be a single connected group of entities.
LazyTurn will swap around and reconnect as it sees fit, so your drawing order can be as arbitrary as you like. In the end though, it must all connect to a single chain. You may have a detailed face
on the chain if you like as LazyTurn will allow for facing operatiosn in the end. The rulers are smart and zoom and pan with you and are programmed to stay on the screen. Ctrl key and shift key are
the modifiers for zooming and panning as in LazyCam, and the center button of the mouse if the rotational control. ( as in LCam)..

  The pentagons on the ruler indicate Stock size ( blue) , profile diamter ( orange) , and bore size ( Not yet implemented) and moving the mouse over them will tell you the actual measurement. ( the ruler is a visual rough guide). Clicking on any pentagram, will allow you to change that value. You may use this to set stock size, or eventhe profile diamter prior to asking for a toolpath generation. The bottom green pentagram is for seting the location of the Z origin. ( many of us prefer to have the Z start at 0 ) and go negative towards the chuck.

  You need to copy this program into your mach3 folder to use it as it uses a dll from lazycam. While this looks similar to lcam, this is a completely new program using almost no LCam code. Its designed to be fast and efficient. Its using many ticks Ive learned to speed things up, and make things more robust.

 Id appreciate any comments on the work so far so that I dont veer away too far from what the majority think is a better GUI interface to control operations. Of course, at this time, the only thing you can do is
display the profile as a turn object, change stock size, start Z, profile diamter, and zoom around and instapect the object. Toolpath generation will come soon when the side bars are ready. Unlike LCam, LazyTurn will
not be displaying chains, and entities, but rather only a list of generated toolpaths and allow you to order them for execution. A button bar will appear for various operations, grovving, boring, roughing..ect..

  My concept of this is a quick load of a profile, a fast easy way to set general relationships between objects, and quick button presses to generate paths. Tools will be a library od graphical tools so you can see the effects as a path
is generated. But all this is in the future. Id like comments on work so far.

Thanks
Art

1336

LazyTurn / LazyTurn

« on: February 13, 2008, 12:39:09 PM »

Hi Guys:

  As you probably know, I tend to futz about form one project to another. But Turning is something I had intended to do for
some time. SO while I can't promise this will come to full development, I am working on a replacement for the turning mode in
LazyCam. When complete, Turning will be removed from LazyCam and will be replaced by this program.
   
  Turning is pretty hard to do for most people. Im really looking for an easy way to make my own profiles. This program is a DXF
or other vector file loader, which then will assist is creating a turning Gcode. It is planned to do boring, facing, roughing, grooving
and finishing from an imported profile. Presently, all thats done is the input and display sections. But Id like to have any input from
Turn people on what exactly makes a program easy to use in terms of generating a Turn profile.

  This program is a raw begining. Dont expect fancy menu's and such till I get there, each step along the way I am analysing just how
easy it is to use and create profiles. This program will , in the end, also allow for profiles to be drawn. At the moment, all you can do is load
pre-existing dxf's, hpgls, or other vector format data. In your mach3 folder under examples, is a "ainsideprofile.dxf" and an "aoutsideprofile.dxf"
which you can use to test this program, and subsequent releases.

  Any comments are welcome as to ease of use, or ideas you may have for the graphical display of whats going on.

 As I said, this is raw, it will allow loading, display of the profile, stock, and measurements of various things in the loaded profile.

The next post wil show a screnshot, have a download link for the program as it stands, and a short description of function.
We'll go from there. This is being done because Ive always felt a bit bad about not supporting lathe users to the levels I had always hoped,
and also as an experiment as just how to make LazyTruning, truly lazy. From the users perspective at any rate.

Thanks
Art

1337

General Mach Discussion / Re: Tribute to Art

« on: January 02, 2008, 07:50:51 PM »

Damn,,, babelfish wont tranlate heiroglyphics..



Art

1338

SmoothStepper USB / Re: Welcome to SmoothStepper forum.

« on: December 30, 2007, 09:46:42 PM »

Its a replacement for printer ports. Its USB, has two printer ports on it, and pulses to 4Mhz..


Art

1339

General Mach Discussion / Re: Everything I learned about setting up a 4th axis & a question/problem **Updated*

« on: December 28, 2007, 10:25:25 PM »

Hi:

 You have it right. You cannot do arcs other than in the XY plane, XZ plane or YZ plane. There is no conceptual plane for
a rotary axis. The checkbox for linear/angualr only tells an axis not to convert when switching from mm to inch, other than that it
has no purpose. A, B and C are always rotary axis.. So using an IJ with an A axis is an error in syntax, though still legal, the missing Y in this
case woudl simply be interpreted as the current Y location, and the A would just be a linearised motion on that axis during the movement of the XY
in the XY plane arc.

Art

1340

Video P*r*o*b*i*n*g / Re: Improving Signal to Noise Ratio

« on: December 28, 2007, 10:09:43 PM »

Hi Tom:

  Interesting thread. I have tried only useing the red channel for the webcam, but its not a great way to go. The red channel of the camera actually picks up quite a wide bandwidth of light, so infra red in lights and such makes it though, very little difference is seen from greyscale to colour or single red channel. In fact using only red channel probably lowers th eoverall resolution of the image. I dont think this section is important above the main problem Im still working on, properly centroiding the beam regsitered to get a thinner line consistantly from frame to frame. I just tried a canny edge filter, but it doesnt look very promising, Im thinking I need to simply implement a wider field gaussian filter to take into accoutn a wider line than I originally thought.  I have been planning on making the laser utrn on and off and subtracting the two to get rid of noise, and I think I may need an attenuation filter as well as the laser typically overwhelms the cameras sensors. I think a attenuation will produce a better line. The meshing is all working quite well,
and now its time to get the aquisition better. I can see form the autocalibration that I really need to start ovber with a better way of filtering the image to get a line segmentation of the laser line into data.. still dwelling on that one..

Art