I spent some time this past weekend and got the R7 finished moving/wired,

General CNC CNC Routers
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I spent some time this past weekend and got the R7 finished moving/wired, vacuum system plumbed and… the new laser installed and running.

I had to get longer cables, and went overboard with 20’ extensions. Everything worked perfectly out of the box (as far as simple terms). After the first trial run and dealing with “laser trails”, I briefly researched how to configure the TinyG and wire it up for start/stop laser light during operation. J-tech had straight forward instructions and with a simple 2 wire connection I was up and running.

I have some tuning to do, mainly slowing down the movements and eliminating z movements. I may also have to increase the jerk settings as all the corners are darker from the slower movements.

Corey

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I had to really increase jerk settings a lot. Make sure to write down your current settings. The laser jerk settings break router bits quite well.

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I’m quickly getting frustrated that Vectric doesn’t have a different set of profiles, either tied into the tool settings or something simple like that. I have almost 7 screen shots with notes on all of them to get my settings back to a cutting profile.

Frankly, that is really annoying…

Corey

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I bet you could edit a $$ dump into a file that could reset all the TinyG settings.

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@Colin_Kaminski I appreciate that idea. There are just numerous settings that I’m having to modify in my Vectric profile for this operation. I’m getting close to the settings I need for successful operation, but will probably look at a completely different software for Laser operations on the R7. http://picengrave.com or something. I need something that can ramp the laser pwm setting (M4 command) vs. the constant M3 200 setting that Vectric is constraining me to. The issues I’m noticing now is the start/stop point overlap enough that there is increased laser burning and numerous parts of letters are darker for operations that require a slower movement (S comes to mind right now).

Corey

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Pleas post what you learn about picengrave. I have been interested in it.

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In my research, picengrave put out 20-30MB files, chilipeppr couldn’t handle it. Additionally, it didn’t appear that text-only files were an option, it had to be incorporated into a photo.

Corey

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I have really enjoyed picengrave, pretty darn simple. Good results first try.
@Corey_Perez did you see if CNC.js would handle the file size?