Re: added laser cutter to my mill (pics)

> >Could you try to mill the copper layer on a Printed Circuit Board?
> >
> >
> No way. It has been tried. CO2 lasers are in a band which copper

reflects

> very effectively, and Copper is an excellent heat conductor. It

apparently

> takes huge power to do this, and the results may not be favorable,

ie. lots

> of burning of the epoxy.
>
> Jon

Yeah, I saw the first post and was going to reply that there was no
way this size laser could cut copper. It will slowly mark annodized
aluminum, and take the paint off of painted metals, but that is about
it.

By the way, I hooked up an atmel microcontroller to the z-axis
direction bit in such a way that when the z-axis goes up, the laser
turns off and when the z-axis goes down, the laser turns on (PWM
control) after a 50millisecond delay. This seems to work fairly
well, but is a total hack solution which does not make me happy
(can't do 3D engraving like this, for one thing). I set the
clearance plane to 0 and the depth of cut to 0.0001, so the z-axis
doesn't move much.

One problem is I can't see a way in VisualMill Pro 5 to control the
laser. I have just been using the shopbotgcode post processor which
doesn't even use the G00 command for rapids. I figured I could turn
the laser off every time a G00 command was issued. Coolant and
spindle are only turned on/off at the beginning and end of the
program. I called Mecsoft and they admitted that there was not much
support for things like lasers, waterjet, wire edm, etc.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Rick