Jeshua, There are advantages to using the Z axis for controlling a laser, but they come with some problems. Among the advantages are coordinating the laser power with the motion of the other axes, lack of stutter as occurs when adjusting laser power when it is tied to the spindle, the ability to draw the desired image in 3D and get a representative, if not strictly accurate rendering / engraving of that image, particularly in rastering type applications, etc.
If you do not need to vary the laser power very often or very quickly, you might be better off tying it to the spindle. Since it is an axis, kinematics is still going to apply to that axis, thus to change it as quickly as possible you will want to use a very small range for the Z value (0.0-0.1 in/mm or smaller) and then scale up to the values required by the DAC. Additionally you need to be very careful with the use of offsets like G92 commands or you may end up at a different laser power than you thought, or even have the laser come on when you thought it should be off in the case of using 0.0 for laser off when toggling the shutter is too slow. There are several articles in the Wiki on the use of lasers with lcnc. Configuration is pretty straight forward, just tie the Z value to the DAC using the built in scale parameter if available, or use a scale component if it is not. Regards, Eric Greetings, I was thinking of controlling my CO2 laser intensity using the Z value in the G-Code. Maybe I could use 0-1 for 0% to 100% percent, or perhaps 0-255. I have a Pico Systems DAC board that outputs 0-5 volts that in turn will control the laser power from 0 to 100%. Can anyone suggest how I could configure LinuxCNC to control the DAC from Z values? Or can anyone suggest if there might be a better way to do it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
