LAOS Laser

Small update.

Sometimes (usually everytime except the first job) the lasercutter started by cutting a big line from top to bottom before executing the actual job.
I found out what it was. In the Visicut lasercutter settings xml there is a flipYaxis value. This was set to true.

Now the settings make more sense. The y.home and y.rest position are actually the distance (in um) to the home/rest position from the endswitch. Because the endswitch is at the top it's simply 0.
The y.scale is now 45000 instead of -45000.

Hi Peter,

In LaOS, the standard is to have the (0,0) point in the lower left corner. The way you configure your machine now, it is in the upper left corner.

Of course, you are free to changes settings any way you want, but this is not the LaOS default and will be confusing for others.

So your small update is not correct: flipYaxis should be true in Visicut (this is the default). y.home = a high number, and y.rest too. They should not be 0.

Jaap

After an enlightening talk with Jaap I updated the wiki. I tried to make everything dummy proof, because the one configuring the lasercutting might not know about motor control (I don't for example). I also tried to elaborate on the process of configuring it.

Armed with the new knowledge I'll try again with our bigger lasercutter and see if I still get the start line issue.

Okay another interesting observation. I measured the horizontal and vertical distance the laser head could move and used that as x.home and y.home setting. But cutted my drawing (placed at 0,0 using VisiCut) lower than 0,0.
This was caused by the Yflip trick and the fact that the bed height setting of my lasercutting was lower. The bed height should be the same distance as the y.home (but then in mm instead of um).

OK, for the next version... maybe Visicut could query the laser for values like this?

A simple implementation would be that Visicut reads a standard file via TFTP, for example it asks for config.txt. It doesn't work now, but we could adapt the TFTP server to send back the current configuration (either "from file" or by creating it from the current settings in memory).

Shame. Did it the way it should be done, but now our big lasercutter cuts this long vertical line from top to bottom before it starts the job. This happens every time except the first time. The strangest thing is that this doesn't happen on our smaller lasercutter.
They both use a firmware version from 29 dec 2012.
The only difference I can think off is the placement of the x endswitch. Maybe left placed horizontal switches aren't properly supported yet.

I've put the config files of both lasercutters on the "overview page":
http://redmine.laoslaser.org/projects/laos/wiki/A_list_of_users_with_LAOS_converted_lasercutters and added them to this post.

Curious to see the beginning of your SimpleCode file. Can we blame Visicut, or is it something in the firmware?

That would be nice. But at the moment this only plays when someone is configuring the lasercutter. I think there are more important issues.

I created a block (10x10mm) and placed it 10x10mm from the top left in VisiCut. And I generated the files for our small and big lasercutter. The simplecode I have is given to me trough the Debug output file function in VisiCut.

There is little difference between the files except from the y distance.

I improved Rick Companje's Simplecode previewer to make it easier to visually check simplecode files.