Engraver Blog

3D Product Photos

I discovered a simple method for adding interest to otherwise boring product photos. It didn't require any fancy software either, just a jquery plugin and a little time taking photos and figuring out how to stuff the photos into an array. The jquery reel plugin works by panning through pictures taken at incremental angles. I setup the engraver on a table and mounted a camera to a stool. Then I slowly rotated the engraver and snapped pictures. After the pictures were taken I assembled them into a 6 × 4 grid with each individual frame 500px wide and 422px high. Once the js file was referenced and the image id set I got a rotating engraver. The image can be rotated by either clicking and dragging or by scrolling the mouse wheel on a PC or by using the two finger scroll on a Mac touch pad.

Big Bonus this Month

Periodically my manager requests that we clean up the overstock. This month the overstock has some awesome bits of equipment, including the two new additions to the engraver. We now have a five foot long X axis and a theta axis to mount to the Engraver. The linear stage will add the needed stiffness with the additional benefit of allowing for longer work pieces. The theta stage will eventual be used for more complex cuts, but for now it just looks cool. Both stages are stepper motors with TTL inputs, so they should blend nicely with the LinuxCNC setup I have. Now I will have to study up on more advanced g-codes and tool path programming to take advantage of the theta stage.

Big Stage

Business Card Test Cut

Finally got the text to g-code to lay out my designs the way I wanted. The test cut looks pretty good. The board wasn't mounted very flat so the cut is a little deeper on the right side, but that's just a mechanical problem.

Photo May 12, 7 46 39 AM

Text to G-Code

After several attempts to use open source CAD to G code programs, I came across a text to g code python script that was included in the EMC installation. Now I can create my business cards! It will take a little planning to set the offsets right and mesh the g codes together, but this is just in time for my new job and new business cards. I did a test cut and created legible text 4 mm high with a rather large ball bit on the dremel.

Engraving!

Finally! Our hard work and long hours drinking beer paid off. We engraved our first plaque today. The whole xyz stage assembly is shown below. The dremel was mounted by tapping a hole the same size as the dremel's collar and then screwing the tool into the mounting bracket. 

Photo Mar 30, 10 02 18 PM

Our first piece of engraved plastic. EMC2.

Photo Mar 30, 10 02 08 PM

Jogging the Stages

It has been a little while since we worked on the engraver. The last time we worked on it I had just gotten the pci parallel port installed and working when the computer crashed hard. So I called it quits that day. I had been unsure of the proper configuration of the parallel port address and so had chosen a number that appeared in one of the tutorials. I now know that this was the wrong number and caused a major fault. Today, after doing some more searching I was sure I had the right address, but still couldn't get any commands out the pci parallel port. Everything I tried resulted in nothing happening, no faults, no error messages and no voltage change. Finally the ME suggested I try a different pci port. Bingo! that was it. It turns out that this is the same computer I burnt up a NI-6025E card in, apparently it also took out part of the pci bus. Now all the axis jog and I even started a part program without trouble. Next time we will tune the steppers and get the home switches working.

Spindle Assembly

The spindle mount has been designed and we started bolting everything in place. We had a used microscope stage that had precise up and down motion. A simple coupler was hacked together to mount a stepper motor onto the microscope stage. First testing proved that the unit performs smooth. We also had a friend mill out a mount for a Dremel tool.

Photo Mar 12, 10 13 05 AM

The stepper motor mount is simply a piece of plastic pipe that happened to fit well enough to the microscope and the motor.

Photo Mar 12, 10 14 24 AM

Parallel Port Installation

Since the first try with the on board parallel port failed because it was a 3.3V model, I ordered a new card from Newegg. The new card is a PCI card with one parallel port and two serial ports. Installing it under Ubuntu Linux was pretty easy. I just plugged it in and the serial ports were immediately recognized. The parallel port was recognized as well, but did not show up in any of the queries. 

The command "lspci -v" correctly identified that I had the card installed. 

To get the parallel port working all I had to do was type one line. But of course there wasn't any change to the lspci -v listing so I figured that it hadn't worked and spent a couple hours trying to trace down a problem that didn't exist. Sometimes its better to just do it.

This is the command that got my parallel port working. I then had to put the address into the EMC HAL configuration file.
/sbin/modprobe parport_pc io=0xdf00 irq=11

15-166-006-06

CNC Kick-Off

After years of piling up and hording seemingly useful junk we have finally collected the right pieces of junk to make something useful. The goal is to assemble the pieces we have into a 3 axis engraver to cut metal business cards. Since the budget for this project is very low, most of the parts are from scrap. The controller is open source and from LinuxCNC and runs on a PC loaded with Ubuntu Linux. The drives and motors are all steppers. The spindle is yet to be determined, but will probably be a Dremel mounted to the Z axis.  

Photo Mar 03, 1 17 31 PM

The LinuxCNC controller uses the parallel port in the PC to command the stepper motors. The port on the mother board of the PC was a 3.3V model and my drives need TTL levels, so I had to order and install a 5V parallel port. It took a bit to configure, mostly because I didn't know of a direct method for testing the Linux configuration. After a couple hours of hacking I found a combination of commands that got the parallel port working. We jogged one of the motors and called it a day.

Photo Mar 05, 9 01 41 AM

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Chris Larson © 2013