Hi,

I recently built a laser marker/cutter for my daughter.  I'm driving the CO2 laser's power through PWM from the spindle speed pin, and it works great.  Z-axis is not enabled.

The only problem that I'm having is with LCAM (3.00.2) forgetting to insert some M3 commands to turn the laser back on after it turns it off through M5 to execute rapids.  I don't see any pattern as to which M3s it forgets.

My source image is HPGL (.plt file) generated with CorelDraw (built this for my daughter who wants it for art-related crafts).  I'm selecting the "plasma" mode under "Import Session Type" when loading the HPGL file.  The image displayed by LCAM looks good.  All the moves in the posted G-code are correct, except for "randomly" missing M3 commands

The G-code works well if I manually introduce the missing M3s, but that gets tedious for a complex image.

Am I doing something wrong or is there a bug in LCAM?

Thanks and Best Regards,

David

Hi, David

Post one of your files saved in hpgl & lset format, Have you tried mill mode post also ?.

I keep hopping Lcam will get tweaked up at some point, There's a LCamSamples folder in Mach3 that list's the Post Var's info. to do your own Post's. Don't think it's complete though.

Sound's like a nice project your doing.

Chip

 

Thanks Chip!

Wrote a short post-processor based on the plasma example and it now works perfectly. 

The whole house now smells of wood smoke... my daughters have not given the poor laser a break since I got it working!

Again, thanks for the quick answer and great pointer towards solving this problem.

Best Regards,

David

Hi, David

Glad it helped, Post some Pic's at some point when the smoke settles.

Thanks, Chip