The story begins with the fact that I decided to build up a laser engraver like this http://3dpburner.blogspot.com/
After a month of waiting all parts from our chinese friends, I finally gathered all together, and was very surprised that it works :) Everything was fine, until the moment when I started to engrave images on different types of material. As it turned out different material requires different feed rate and varying the intensity of the laser. Had to print a lot of times the same image to achieve proper results. Then I decided to write the software, which would be able to adjust the machine settings directly in the printing process, to speed up the debugging process. So i wrote a little app for engraving wich looks like this(upd. current version 2.0.2)
The work principle is as follows:
- Connect to your engraver
- Open prepared 8bit grayscale image in BMP format
- Adjust the initial parameters for engraving(feedrate, laser power, scan)
- If you want see where image will be printed on the material, click the button "Show dimensions". This will turn on the laser on minimum power (S0) and you will see rectangle where image will be printed
- Wear your laser safety goggles !!!
- Click "PRINT" to start engraving process.
- During the engraving you can adjust parameters such as feed rate and laser power. Changes become active only after pressing "Save Apply" button.
App generates following G-code for diagonal scan
F2600
G90
G21
G1S0M3
X0Y76.8S86.84
X0Y76.7S91.36
X0.1Y76.8S86.84
X0.2Y76.8S91.36
X0.1Y76.7S86.84
X0Y76.6S86.84
X0Y76.5S86.84
*******
M5M30
... And for horizontal scan
F2600
G90
G21
G1S0M3
X0Y76.8S86.84
X0.1
X0.2S91.36
X0.3S86.84
X0.4
X0.5S91.36
X0.6S86.84
X0.7
X0.8S91.36
X0.9S86.84
X1
*******
M5M30
Links:
http://3dpburner.blogspot.com/p/files.html - Custom GRBL firmware
PS. There are still a lot of bugs in app, but anyway i hope it will be usefull.
source are aviable here https://github.com/zesava/I2L
