Hi, I am trying to set up a laser cutting/engraving system with Mach3, for engraving I want to use Art's plugin, but I have experienced some problems and I have some queries.
First of all, the 5us (or optional 40us) pulses are too short for my PWM CO2 laser, so I use the digital trigger pulses as a trigger for a variable pulse width pulse generator, which I connect to the gate input of a homebuilt CO2 laser controller (basically a gated 20kHz PWM oscillator with manual pulsewidth control via front panel knob).
When I first tried this, all I got was a mess - after a lot of fiddling around, I realised that unless the image is exactly square, it seems to produce multiple, superimposed images along the x-axis. As I don't really understand how the plugin works, I can't work out what I'm doing, or doing wrong.
The settings in the plugin do not really make sense to me - in particular, why does changing the "width (x axis)" affect the "size of the Y pixel (in steps)". Is this a simple labelling error? Can anybody out there help? Art?
Thanks,
Ilya