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

skykotech wrote:

>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.
>

That's a cool way to assure coordination between laser and table motion!
Very clever!

>
>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?
>
>

Yes, I think you are at the point where you want to move to a better CNC
package. EMC or Mach2 come to mind.

Jon