Wildthing
Legendary member
Further adventures in laser-engraving…
First, I want to thank a few folks over on the V1Engineering forum. Victor for his really neat ImageToGcode program... and his help getting me up and running with the latest version. Also, I’ve also learned some pretty interesting stuff playing with Aaryn’s Laser Calibration Power vs Feedrate “thing”. And thanks go to Jamie for his really neat and handy Test Pattern Generator. I’ve been playing with all of these over the past few days and it’s been very interesting. I’ve learned a lot… but, an old man, I’m sure I’ll have opportunities to learn it all over again — several times — in future adventures. 😉
First, a confirmation… definitely run from SD card whenever possible. Sending the gcodes across USB will have undesired and discernable effect on the image being engraved. These photos show the same files being run twice — once from Octoprint/Pi over USB and the other using LCD/SD — and show dramatically different results…
our old “shades of gray”…
and Aaryn’s Laser Calibration Power vs Feedrate gcode (unaltered)…
Then, using info gleaned from Aaryn’s gcode, I was able to get reasonably good images using laser powers, ranging from full down to 1/6 (17%), at various speeds and resolution with Victor’s ImageToGcode.
Finally, I decided to try hand-editing gcode generated with Jamie's Test Pattern Generator... for laser vs. pen/marker. I had to brush up on my regular expression “skills” but managed to get Jamie’s code running with laser… and then used that to fine tune the steps/mm on my FoamRipper’s X and Y axes.
A little parallax from the thickness of the ruler and the position of the camera but it’s dead on now…
I’ll stop here… for fear of making a bigger mess of this post. But I wanted to get these posted before I forgot everything.
— David
very cool, I wish you were my neighbor