The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Improvements

Making the world a better place, one piece at a time

OMTech 60 W Laser: Plant Markers
While calibrating the laser’s scan offset, I also tried various fonts:

Offset cal – text – overview

Putting two lines of the most-readable font inside an outline reverse-engineered from a few handwritten samples let me cut out a bunch of plant markers from white-on-black Trolase acrylic:

Plant Markers – cutting

Which look downright dignified in real life:

Plant markers – African Violet

Admittedly, sweet potato slips don’t require such extensive documentation:

Plant Markers – sweet potatoes

Cutting the sheet flat on the honeycomb platform worked well, modulo Sadler’s warning about cutting acrylic, and a few smudges on the back of the markers will go unnoticed.

This was actually an excuse to use LightBurn’s Variable Text feature, so the tags contain formatting codes:

Plant Markers – Variable Text template

The codes give the position and format for text fields in a CSV file containing one line for each tag:
```
Austrocylindropuntia subulata,Eve’s Pin Cactus
Euphorbia,abyssiniaca
possibly G. Carinata,var. Verucosa
African Violet,Maui
Sansevieria trifasciata,Mother in law’s tongue
Plectranthus,'Mona Lavender'
```
The rules governing quoted strings and suchlike remain to be explored, but single quotes in the CSV file pass through unchanged.

Putting a tab at the point of the marker will prevent it from falling free when cut out, should you want to try raising the sheet above the platform to reduce the amount of crud accumulating on the back side.
2022-05-18
OMTech 60 W Laser: Engraving Scan Offset Adjustment

The fuzzy edges engraved on the acrylic test sample showed the need for scan offset adjustment:

Please Close The Gate – acrylic test piece

The problem arises from the finite delay between the controller turning the laser beam on and the rise time of the death ray energy at the focal point.

LightBurn can produce a calibration coupon (on Trolase laminated acrylic) to help explore the multidimensional parameter space:

Offset cal – zero offset – overview

The “Interval” value is the vertical (Y-axis) scan line spacing. The laser spot diameter is, at absolute best, about 0.2 mm on the focal plane, with the actual engraved line being smaller due to the energy distribution across the beamwidth and the power required to visibly damage the material, so a 0.1 mm interval should result a little bit of overlap between adjacent scan lines.

A closer look shows the serrated edges on the left and right sides of the engraved squares:

Offset cal – zero offset – detail

Peering at it through a measuring magnifier suggests the offset is a bit over 0.2 mm at 400 mm/s, corresponding to a 500 µs delay between laser turn-on in the rightward direction and turn-off in the leftward direction.

The LightBurn Scanning Offset Adjustment is half the measured distance, with an Initial Offset parameter to adjust the starting point of the first scan line. You measure the distance at each speed and fill in the table accordingly.

Iterating through offsets, speeds, powers, and intervals produces a series of test coupons slicing through the parameter space:

Offset cal – iteration

All in all, a 0.1 mm offset at 400 mm/s with 14% power (about 8 W) and 0.075 mm interval looks pretty good:

Offset cal – final offset – detail

Engraving various fonts:

Offset cal – text – overview

A closer look (left coupon on the top):

Offset cal – text detail

LightBurn linearly interpolates between table entries of offset values at specific speeds, so you must fill in several lines to give it something to munch on. The top text came from an offset table with two entries at 400 and 500 mm/s, which obviously wasn’t quite sufficient. The bottom text comes from a three-entry table:

LightBurn scan offset table

Which produces a better result, even at 500 mm/s and 20% power (12 W) on scrap acrylic:

Close Gate – test acrylic – overview

A closer look:

Close Gate – test acrylic – detail

Much better!

2022-05-16
Laser-cut Cutworm Collars

Mary, having had considerable trouble with cutworms in her gardens, routinely deploys cardboard collars around new plants:

Cutworm Collars – assembled

It seems cutworms trundle around until they find an edible plant, chew through the stem and topple the plant, then trundle off without taking another bite. A small cardboard barrier prevents them from sensing the plant: apparently, motivation to climb a short wall hasn’t yet evolved.

Up to this point, Mary applied scissors to tissue boxes, but I proposed an alternative with an adjustable fit to any plant:

Laser Cutting Cutworm Collars

A splayed cardboard box rarely lays flat, a condition enforced by a few MDF stops used as clamps.

Come to find out no two tissue boxes have identical dimensions, even boxes from the same brand / retailer, so lay out duplicates of the collar template to match your stockpile.

That was fun!

The SVG image as a GitHub Gist:

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2022-05-12
OMTech 60 W Laser: Adjustable Honeycomb Stops

When you (well, I) get fussy about angular alignment on the laser cutter’s honeycomb platform, an adjustable stop or two may come in handy:

Laser Honeycomb – Adjustable Pins

That’s a serving suggestion based on a true story, because I really wasn’t all that fussy about precise engraving alignment on those signs.

A more typical situation on a smaller scale:

Laser Honeycomb – Adjustable Pins – engraving

The scrap of MDF with three holes provides angular alignment for the little two-color acrylic test coupon, so you can tuck successive squares into the corner, hammer them with slightly different patterns, then compare the results.

The stops are an off-center hole (the ±3 text gives the offset) in an MDF disk with an acetal post:

Laser Honeycomb – Adjustable Pins – detail

The 3 mm SHCS provides a convenient way to turn the post and disk, so the threading isn’t critical. Sufficiently snug threading will let you turn the screw counterclockwise without loosening it, but that surely depends on how tightly the 8 mm section fits into the honeycomb. The larger top section is 9mm, cleaned up from the rod’s nominal 3/8 inch OD, for a jam fit into the 8.8 mm + 0.1 mm kerf hole.

The SVG images as a GitHub Gist:

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The ±5 mm offset disk may be more useful with larger items and now you know where those three holes came from.

2022-05-11
Tour Easy: Terracycle Chain Idler Bushing

It turns out that under rare conditions, triggered by fumbling a front derailleur shift, the upper chain section (out of the picture on the top) can whip vertically enough to jam between the Terracycle Idler’s mounting bolt and its longer chain retaining pin:

Tour Easy – Terracycle idler

Whereupon the chain falls off the chainring, jams firmly between the spider and the crank, and brings the proceedings to a halt.

Having finally figured out the cause, I made a simple bushing to fit around the mounting bolt, reduce the gap, and (I hope) eliminate the problem:

Tour Easy – Terracycle idler bushing

Given its rarity, I will need a few more years to verify the solution.

Might get around to cleaning the chain one of these days, too …

2022-05-10
OMTech 60 W Laser: Dual-path Air Assist

A tweak to the air assist plumbing of my OMTech 60 W laser produces much the same result as Russ Sadler’s Super Ultimate Air Assist, with somewhat less plumbing and cheaper Amazon parts:

OMTech Laser – air assist – plumbing

The overall doodle shows the electrical wiring and pneumatic plumbing:

Dual-path air assist diagram

The electronics bay now has two solid state relays:

OMTech Laser – air assist SSRs

The front SSR turns on the air pump when the controller activates the STATUS or AUX AIR outputs; the diode between the (-) terminals acts as wired-OR.

The rear SSR turns on the solenoid valve whenever the AUX AIR output is active. The diode turns on the other SSR to start the pump.

When the laser cutter is idle, both the STATUS and AUX AIR outputs are inactive, so the pump doesn’t run and the solenoid is closed.

The controller has a front-panel AUX AIR button that turns on its eponymous output, which turns on both the solenoid and the pump. I have turned it on to verify the circuitry works, but don’t do any manual cutting. I never was very good with an Etch-a-Sketch and the laser’s UI is much worse.

LightBurn includes an Air Assist setting for each cut layer, which should be OFF for engraving layers and ON for cutting layers. Basically, you go through the Material Library and tweak all the values , then It Just Works™ when you assign that material setting to a particular layer.

The solenoid valve must be a “direct acting solenoid valve“, as the air pump produces about 3 psi and cannot activate a “self piloted” solenoid valve. When the valve is open, the pump can push about 12 l/min through the plumbing to the nozzle:

OMTech Laser – air assist – 12 lpm flow

That’s noticeably lower than the 1 4 l/min without all the valves and additional plumbing.

The flow control valve is a manually adjusted needle valve to restrict the engraving air flow to maybe 2 l/min, just enough to keep the smoke / fumes out of the nozzle and away from the lens, when the solenoid valve is closed.

I set the controller to delay for 1 s after activating the air pump to let it get up to speed. There’s an audible (even to my deflicted ears) rattle from the flowmeter when the air assist solenoid opens.

The paltry 12 l/min seems to promote clean cuts and 2 l/min doesn’t push much smoke into the surface around the engraved area.

So far, so good.

2022-05-05
OMTech 60 W Laser: Improved COB LED Shades

Adding (fake) rivets to the COB LED shade brackets definitely improves their appearance:

Acrylic COB LED Shade – installed

I cut new shades from vintag e clear acrylic sheet, with more aluminized mylar attached to the lower surface: you can barely see the COB LED strip through the reflecting surface.

Depending on how you arrange all the hardware hanging on the nozzle, the shades can collide with something at the home position in the far right corner:

Acrylic COB LED Shade – X clearance

Definitely a step up from cardboard …

2022-05-03