Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: added laser cutter to my mill (pics)

Hi Rick
I just put a microswitch on the mill head with a little arm that comes off
the laser. When the quill goes down .015" it turns the laser on and up
turns it off. Works great with the gcode generated by the text to gcode
program I downloaded off the net.

Bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "skykotech" <rick@...>
To: <CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 11:04 AM
Subject: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] 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
>
>
>
>
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