GearHeads Corner

Early last year I bought a Pokeys57CNC board and started to setup Auggie on my CNC laser to replace an old Xylotec board and LinuxCNC control.  I had been running LinuxCNC for about a year on the laser but didn't like the raster image output. 

I was able to get the machine in motion with homing, limits, EStop, soft limits and etc rather quickly without too much difficultly.  But I had no luck firing the laser.  I had to temporarily stop the project due to other higher priority work until a few days ago. I've watched most the YouTube videos Art linked to the Gearotic website and can report that when I press the FIRE button the control LED lights as it should but the laser doesn't fire.

I used Pokeys to ATTEMP to assign my PWM output to PWM 0 (pin 22 connected to LCD connector pins 15&16).  I save to device, fire up Auggie.  I open the Engine Config Engine/Planner config and set the PWM Channel to 0.  The rest of the values are at the default.

I FIRE the laser but all I get is the FIRE LED lights for the time I set.  The interesting part is when I go back to look at Pokeys config I see the configuration has changed to PWM0 and PWM2 both enabled.  Hmmm.

What am I doing wrong?  To be honest,  I have not dusted off my o'scope yet so I haven't really verified if there is any pulse output to my laser diode controller.  Thought I'd check in here to verify my config and understanding before that. 

Which pins on the Pokeys57CNC board should I be using?  Why does the Pokeys config change by itself after running Auggie?  I'm kinda lost in the libraries.  Which Library/ Scripts/GCode should be enabled?  I have GCodeLib and SpindleLib-Laser on.  SpindleLib-Frequency and SpindleLib-RelayOnly are both off.  Is this correct?

Oh yeah, Auggie Ver 3.70000.  It's this the latest?  Pokeys57CNC v4.3.43.

Thanks for the assist,
Mark

Oopsy (as my grandchildren say).  I did dust off the scope and see the trigger pulse when I hit the FIRE button.  Laser still didn't fire but it may be caused by wiring or the optocoupler circuit in my laser control board.  Wrong polarity pulse?

I'll go back to troubleshooting....

Mark

Hi Mark:

Make sure the PWM is longer or shorter depending fire time selected. If is does vary,
I suspect your on your way. You have to have the

GCodeLib and SpindleLib-Laser enabled under Gcode as well as
MotionIO under IO.

  I think thats it, as long as an M3 has been run , the fire button should work.
Make sure you ran an M3 in the single line MDI though, it wont shoot unless
M3 is activated. It should flash that laser is  enabled at that point.

Art

Thanks Art.  I'll check to make sure but am pretty confident they are set as you indicated.  When I hit the fire button the led in auggie lights for the time I have selected,  1 sec.

After t/s I think it a connection problem.  I'm using an OCOC output driving an optically isolated input in my laser control board.  Once I looked at two schematics I see it cannot work.  Tomorrow I'll charge to a DIO33 type output.  Pretty confident that will work.

Mark

It was working on my head so I had to go try my solution tonight.  I knew I'd never sleep.

I used the DIO33 type pin 18 on Pokeys57CNC  (PWM4 in Auggie).  I can now fire the laser diode.  10% power results in approximately 1A power from 5V laser supply.  100% is 4A. 0% is 0A.  So I am varying the laser power at least.

Still not sure what period to pwm freq to use but that will wait until tomorrow along with other fine tuning.

Mark

Mark:

Glad to hear you've got it working. Nice to see so many people
using Auggie these days. Let us know how your photos and engravings
turn out.

Art

Well I had some unexpected problems when I got back to this finally.  It appears that using the physical pin associated with logical pin 18 (PWM) also can be used to put the Pokeys57CNC into recovery mode. 

While it worked initially (don't know why) for my quick check, it didn't work the following day AFTER I physically cleaned up some wiring and mounted my laser control box.  Took me a bit of troubleshooting fiddling and reading before I eliminated my wiring changes and found what caused the "recovery" mode situation.  Bottom line is I lost all of my configs due to fiddling and had to start from scratch again.  I now have a backup.  Sheesh.

I'm using pin 20 (PWM 2) now.  No more "recovery mode" drama since.

I have some questions regarding laser raster engraving but I think I'll start a new thread for that once I collect my thoughts.

Here is my first attempt.  Too dark.  But none of the "over burning" that I saw using LINUXCNC and standard Gcode.  I used PWM defaults in AUGS ap.  My laser diode is  455nm  10W at 40ipm.  It took 1hr 1min.  I haven't tried vector engraving yet.  Wish me luck.

Mark

Oops.  I loaded the wrong video.  I apologize to the owner of the attached video. I don't know how top edit and delete it.  I did manage to load the correct pic of my raster engraving.

Mark:

  Awesome, looks like your there. Of course, you'll be fiddleing with settings to find your
sweet spots, but Im glad to see such a nice test image..

Art