Hi, I have an engraving spindle that rides on a spring-loaded carrier. The carrier rubs against the workpiece being engraved. The depth of cut is controlled by adjusting the distance that the engraving bit protrudes from the rub contact face of the carrier. The advantage of this tool is that it is not dependent on the thickness of the workpiece, so it works well for inconsistent material. It also holds down flexible materials as it’s being engraved.
The problem is that the depth of cut is manually adjusted via a screw on the carrier. This is particularly cumbersome, for example, when engraving and cutting multiple pieces on the same job. I’m looking to design an engraving tool that measures and compensates for depth of cut in real time. What I would like to do is mount the spindle directly to the z-axis (as one normally would). Then have a collar that surrounds the engraving bit rub with spring pressure against the top surface of the workpiece. This collar would be mounted to a linear axis with an encoder, in the same orientation as the z-axis, and thus track the surface of the workplace relative to the spindle position. The LinuxCNC output to the motor drivers is step-direction I’m thinking that with appropriate PID limits, I don’t need to do anything special in the control logic other than setting this up as a regular servo axis with encoder feedback. Comments? Insights? Thaddeus Waldner _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
