On dust, you’re supposed to run these machines fully enclosed, they also generate a fair amount of dust and smoke.
I don’t think core xy is a good idea. Gcode based cnc controllers for laser are limited in speed. Smoothie Cluster has a theoretic 1000 gcodes per second, but closer to 800. Running at 250 dpi which is low but common for most materials, you may be sending up to 250 gcodes a second, just turning the laser on and off. 500 dpi is also common, so 500 gcodes per second, not including movements. So your speed may be limited to around 75mm/s.
Dsp controllers have a 500khz steprate, in contrast to 120khz of smoothie and 12khz of an Arduino. But they don’t operate in corexy.
In fact, the dsp controller is so fast, it can move faster than the laser can fire, so offsets need to be input to prefire the laser. I use a single nema 17 dual shaft stepper for the Yaxis. According to the controller, my rapids are at 500mm/s as well.
I’ve since changed the x belt to 10mm belt and working on enclosing it in acrylic and aluminum composite board. Also added endstops as well. Including the chiller, I’m only about $2000 in to it, buy it’s already paid itself off. My cnc gets larger projects, but less frequent than the laser does, lots of smaller jobs on the laser. But both combined make some really nice projects.
I am planning to rebuild my 40 watt into it’s own enclosure, and I was thinking of using the previously mentioned idea of using the mpcnc carriages for the dual Y axis and some extrusion for the X axis. Any interest in a build thread? @vicious1 maybe a collaborative effort? Obviously I can modify the stl’s, but if you have time (I know it’s not much these days), I would like to build a V1 laser system.
Do you mean you will make the Y carriages synced with a belt or something? I thought the fear was that the motors would lose sync and you’d poke your eye out? Or is that the enclosure’s job?
I hadn’t seen the dual shaft steppers until recently but as soon as I saw them I wondered if the MPCNC setup could be adapted to run them instead of dual steppers (because of my laser hopes/wishes).
I could certainly build a completely sealed enclosure for the laser. Vented to outdoors. More and more I’m wondering if I should wall off a 1/4 of my garage into a little room for dust free working space. I think that’s something worthy of serious consideration. However I have a radiant tube heater in there that would dictate that the “room” is on the other side of the garage than the side the machines currently reside in. Big project.
Hmm, I may modify the zenxy carriages or something, or possibly redesign the motor mount plates from the mpcnc to bolt on square steel tube or aluminum extrusion. No need to bother Ryan about it.
Since the y stepper would be off the y carriages, the original place where bearings were used with the motor pulleys can be the belt mounts. with the emt I have here, would maybe need to do a break in run to get them smooth since they have that galvanized scaling on there.
