LAOS Laser

So cutter now running fast with the genuine Pololu drivers in-place and the current limiting set appropriately. The Stepper motors are actually warn now, and the controllers running at an acceptable temperature. (ie. hot enough to burn, but not so hot that your skin vaporises ;-)

However - it's running too fast )-:

With a max. speed of 500mm/sec in the config file - it will go faster, but... the issue now is that to cut 3mm acrylic, the speed in VisiCut needs to be about 1.5... But it seems that either VisiCut or the firmware on the mbed is not accepting that. I've been timing it and it seems that anything > 1.0 is the same as 2. (which is too fast to cut all the way through)

So can anyone confirm that this is the case (ie. not accepting fractions?)

To get round it, I've had to slow the motion.speed down to 100 to give some leeway in the %speed settings in VisiCut - which I'm finding somewhat irksome as moves are now at that speed, and uni-directional engraving is much slower (to the point, I've moved to bi-directional which looks just fine to me)

I've not dived into the code yet, but am I correct in thinking that motion.speed is for moving and cutting, and x.speed, y.speed applies to engraving? (x,y.speed is 500 and engraving is flying)

If so, I wonder if this could be altered in any way? - needs 3 sets of parameters as I see it: non-cutting moves, cutting moves and engraving... I'm running the engraving at 100% speed, 80% power and it's working rather well (and fast - although the laser makes a bit of noise now)

-Gordon