Hi Art,

Wow, that motion is fantastic – I’d love to have that on my CNC (perhaps one day).

My view is that the motion would not cause any damage to a glass CO2 tube (the water coolant mass is really not that great) but…

There are serious problems with mounting single CO2 laser tubes (metal or glass) vertically – basically there is debris produced as a result of the RF or plasma arcs, this debris settles (under gravity) onto the ‘output coupler’ which burns in and results in early failure of this component. For example, Synrad withdraw their warranty on tubes mounted beyond a specified degrees from the horizontal. Having said that, the ‘double’ glass tubes which only have 100% reflecting mirrors at the lower end (outside the plasma envelope) are often mounted vertically in medical equipment. Obviously their tubes are changed very frequently but I think it indicates that there are ways around the problem.

I think you would have to go a long way to better the performance of the Mach3 Impact / Laser Engraving plugin (which you wrote way back when) but I look forward to hearing more of your progress.

Keep up the good work my friend.

Tweakie.

Could you not mount it horizontal and use either a mirror or fiber optic to redirect the beam to vertical ??

Just a thought, (;-) TP

   I think Ill give a shot on a vertical mounting anyway and see how it can work.
I can always reuse the power supply if I end up burning out the tube.
  That saves quite a bit of hassle on mirrors and such. I really would like to build a
laser as a complete unit for snapping on or off the gantry. An Arduino will run it and
take care of safeties and such as well as a fast PWM routine for power control.

Art

Hello All:

  --REDACTED -- incompatible with latest hobbymach release.

  Enclosed is a test of Darwin. Its tested with Mach4  as of Today.
It does homing, probing and general motion. It is Limited to 2
axis only. Instructions are in the zip folder for how to use it, if you
currently use Mach3 with XP and a printer port it should run fine.

Good luck, have fun,
Art

Wow! - Thanks Art, now I know what I will be doing this afternoon 

Tweakie.

Tweaky:

   I finally finished today digesting that very long engraver thread of yours. Facinating stuff, youve done
great work with that old engraving plugin and that Synrad of yours. I have a Synrad J48-1 on its way, Im crossing
my fingers that its a working one as the Ebay seller advertised.

   Seems to me Mach4 will require a new engraving plugin perhaps a bit more powerfull than Mach3's. We'll
have to discuss that as things develop. Ill start a new thread when I begin and document the process as you did
with your engraving machine journey. (Ill only start a new thread because your is soooo long. lol)

Have fun,
Art

   

Hi Art,

That old plugin is going to take some bettering you know 

Incidentally, because the Digital Trigger only has a maximum duty cycle of 50% I am now experimenting with using an external processor to measure the PRF (dependant on Feed-Rate) and adjust the pulse width to increase the duty cycle to 95% (adjustable). This has enabled the plugin's use with diode lasers down to 150mW output power allbeit extremely slow feed-rate and my 40Watt tube to really attack Corian at 4500 mm/min. 

I look forward to following your progress in the new thread once you get everything up and running. 

Tweakie.

Tweak...

  I'll be using a test platform speed of 14000mm/min for the new plugin..  Im thinking Id like to see what I can do with subpixelation
of the data. With the Synrad I see 20Khz can be done which should allow for some interesting subpixelation routines to upconvert
resolutions on the fly. The old engraving plugin actually does a small version of that with its auto dithering of gray codes, but I think
it'd be better to actually use the power as the gray code.. anyway..lots to play with..


Art

hi art I played with Darwin last night on the latest version of Mach4 it worked just took a lot of farting around to get to stay stable. crashed a lot. I just had to start slowly bring up the pulse rate and speed at the same time, I got it to run at 500mm/min with a pulses rate of 3700, that needs to go higher yet.
its running on a very old win XP computer that is half of the problem.

Dan:
 
   I highly suspect the latest version of Mach4 has a bug in XP.. Ive removed the driver until its again compatable, I was running 14500mm/min in version
1767

Art