Here the error,
and the board!
It´s an Aqua modified to portuguese 9you can see that it has the engraving still not translated)

Hi Jan,

Your trigger circuit looks fine and that is a very nice screen set you have produced 
Unfortunately, the plugin will only support parallel port operation at this time 

Tweakie.

Hi Tweakie,
It is a pity!
With USB you can use a much powerful cpu.
This one is installed in a Dell I7,with 6 gb mem and a 2 gb video board.
And it is a Dell notebook you can take it everywhere.
I have another Dell note a 5500 with core2duo and will give a try.
Thanks a lot for your time !

Tweakie,

I have been following your work for a while. Your posts have greatly helped me for the last few years. I used the Impact engraving plugin for years and it worked well speed wise. I have now upgraded to a 5x10 1500IPM Ethernet driven smoothstepper machine. I used PicEngrave that you had recommended in one of your posts. And it works but as you can imagine it's much slower because of the many lines of code and small movements.

So my question is do you have any recommendation for the impact plugin to work with the ESS board? or any alternative method to laser engraving other than rastering with Gcode.

Thank's for you help!

Hi Enphecktor,

Unfortunately, because of the way in which the plugin works it cannot be used with the ESS board.

For vector laser engraving you may wish to give this method a try ??   http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,12444.msg194200.html#msg194200   

Tweakie.                                                                                                                 

Sorry Guys...

 Ive notified the m4 guys.. little I can do till they fix it..

Art

Here the trigger:

I've read this thread all the way through, but I don't see any plans available on how to build the impact device. I've been through http://www.robotfactory.it/ site as best I could even with Google translate and still don't see one for sale or anything.

So does anybody wanna spend the time to post up some viable methods to make one of the gadgets?

Please?

I'm not the most savvy on schematics. I know there's a lot smarter folks than me that this is sufficient for.

Hi Vogavt,

A bit more reading for you http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,16446.0.html

I think this explains the construction of the magnet.

Tweakie.

Hi Vogavt,

A bit more reading for you http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,16446.0.html

I think this explains the construction of the magnet.

Tweakie.

Good one, Tweakie! Got a chuckle out of your link.

Anyway, for the rest of us illiterate in reading schematics posted here, could someone provide a useful answer to my question?

Presuming I've figured out how to build the magnet as Tweakie suggested, what actually drives it?
I have a Gecko 540 (all 4 axis are in use), but can I assume I need to purchase another single driver board and say I hook it up configured for Axis-B and connect the newly constructed impact magnet to it? I do have a second Parallel Port that I could drive the 5th axis with, maybe.

Thanks in advance!
Vogavt

Hi Vogavt,

My apologies if I have confused the issue.  As you will have already read…

Andrea found that electromagnets ‘stall’ in the same manner as stepper motors ‘stall’ and he used this principle to drive his magnet from one phase of a bipolar stepper motor driver. This is probably the easiest method to at least get started with impact engraving and as you have mentioned another single axis driver board will be required. As only the ‘step’ pulse is required you may not need to fit a second parallel port.

In the quest for more speed and higher impact force I have turned to higher drive voltages and TTL / Transistor switching of the magnet but this requires some knowledge of electronics / circuit diagrams etc.

The whole process (and the software plugin)  is perhaps still experimental because I believe we have not yet found the best way so please report back on your progress and we can all learn together.

Tweakie.