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Nevets posted:I'm glad I was lucky enough to be born in the US, if I grew up in the People's Republic of California I'm sure I would have a tumor by now. Extension cords, sawdust, everything causes cancer there. My prediction for WW3 is that it starts when they label coffee beans as carcinogenic and in response Seattle blocks all their ISP's from Amazon. Things escalate pretty quickly from there. I just bought a gutter elbow for my pressure-cleaner, and it came with a “The state of California wants you to know that this product causes cancer” warnings in the package. It’s nine inches of stainless tubing, mandrel bent into a 140° elbow, with a nozzle on one end, and a brass quick-disconnect on the other. What the actual gently caress is going to cause cancer?
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Jun 19, 2018 13:30
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MrYenko posted:I just bought a gutter elbow for my pressure-cleaner, and it came with a “The state of California wants you to know that this product causes cancer” warnings in the package.
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Jun 19, 2018 15:15
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I think they may also put that warning on stuff that has "known-to-california" factors used just in the manufacturing process. So if it went through an acid bath or something, boom, sticker. I may be wrong though.
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Jun 19, 2018 15:31
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We went through procedure of aligning the mirrors on the laser by burning a bunch of holes in tape, and it seems pretty well centered now, but still are having a lot of difficulty getting consistent power levels across the bed. Parts cut straight through on some parts of bed and in others require significant speed decrease to get through the material. I think some of issue might be that the honeycomb is not a perfect surface plate, and variations in focus are causing some effects, but even when refocusing the laser in each part of the bed being tested, it seems power is not very consistent. I've read that adding a beam expander(+collimator combo) might be able to help with this, does anyone know what these are all about? It sounds like its something that you would just plop between the laser tube and the first mirror and it spreads the beam out which somehow is supposed to make the beam more consistent across the bed and also seemingly magically can focus to higher power densities? And as I understand the focusing lens and other optics would stay the same, requiring no modification? I guess I originally thought that these laser cutters were already using a wide-ish beam or something to spread the beam out so that thermal stress on mirror was spread over larger area; but after seeing the holes burnt in tape it appears there's nothing built-in doing that.
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Jun 28, 2018 13:39
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You touch on both of these, but in my experience that kind of thing is either bed out of parrallel with the head, or the beam moving out of alignment at the extremes. The first is easiest to check by using a gauge. For the second, what's the procedure you're using for alignment? Are you doing it at both extremes?
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Jun 28, 2018 16:51
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Aurium posted:You touch on both of these, but in my experience that kind of thing is either bed out of parrallel with the head, or the beam moving out of alignment at the extremes. One annoying thing is there's a membrane switch on the laser panel to fire the laser that juts fires as long as you hold it, but its hard to get a consistent pulse length, and sometimes the tape catches fire instead of just blasting a small hole. Not sure if there's any way to have a manually triggered precisely controlled pulse length on this thing. Anyways for now I'm not really doing any cutting jobs(anyways it can be made to cut acceptably if speed is reduced overall), so I'm not too motivated to re-align at the moment. I did play with engraving and tried out the rotary axis. First try had massive slippage on the rotary axis and we found the drive pulley set screw was completely loose and required tightening. Second try we were able to make a decent beer bottle engraving with a quick generated line art thing I came up with:   Anyone have experience with any kind of scriptable 2d path drawing? I like generating interesting geometric sort of patterns and line art like this through scripts. I actually used OpenSCAD to export a 2d dxf that was used on the bottle above, but openscad only models "solids" even in 2d, so all lines are edges that have thickness and it ends up doing a thing were the laser draws over every path twice, for the outer and inner edges basically. And if any lines touch then it merges them into one weird polygon which really screws the toolpath. I'm interested in trying librecad 3, which apparently has a Lua scripting interface, but I haven't had luck getting it to compile. I've done a little bit of scripting of 2D vector output for lasers in the past using python Pyx library, maybe I will just go back to that. Just wondering if there's any other options I should check out. peepsalot fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Jun 30, 2018 |
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Jun 30, 2018 14:44
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Lots of people doing art-focused stuff in Processing
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Jun 30, 2018 19:07
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Sounds like your bed is out of square. Mine's "sweet spots" shift somewhat between summer and winter for example. Deal with it is one option
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Jun 30, 2018 19:17
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Have you considered generating svgs directly? Many languages have decent svg support. From there it's a quick trip though inkscape for a dxf. I you can even script inkscape directly, but it's mostly aimed at making plugins, so I don't know how good the workflow would be for more generalized use. Aurium fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jun 30, 2018 |
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Jun 30, 2018 19:18
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The plugin system for Inkscape provides a couple SVG helper object, but for the most part, you're interacting with SVG directly in Python.
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Jun 30, 2018 19:20
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ante posted:Lots of people doing art-focused stuff in Processing I found that Processing can export to PDF format and spent a day working up a specific script/design I wanted, only to go to the cutting software and realize that PDF isn't supported in RDWorks, software for this laser. Here are the file types it says I can import:  Processing also has some ability to export to DXF but the docs were confusing and vague and it sounded like it was only intended for 3D tesselated mesh, not 2d arcs etc. I also tried for a while to get python PyX library running again, I had used it years ago on another computer and laser cutter and saved some example scripts. However this time I ran into some python dependency hell and couldn't make anything run. The project seems to be dead for 3 years now anyways, so maybe I'll stop pursuing that. I found there is a Python library "ezdxf" so I guess that will be my next attempt to script a sensible laser-able file. https://ezdxf.mozman.at/ I have hopes that this one will be a good fit for what I want.
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Jul 2, 2018 12:48
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