Hi everyone.
I’m thinking of building a 4 axis on my lowrider.
I know some people disconnect either the X or Y axis and connect it there. But we have the extra output on our jackpot board.
Can’t I use that instead?
Can’t I use that instead?
someone is right now. Let me see if i can find it
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@Britt Can you help here?
Britt recently posted about using the spare for a 4th axis
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We discussed this recently and I posted my config changes that worked
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We have users doing that as you see above.
What CAM software and workflow do you have?
What kind of things are you planning to do with your rotary axis?
I use inventor, Lightburn and vcarve.
I don’t have any tasks right now that require a 4 axis. But I’m going to give myself a little hobby project this winter.
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I do know that others have just disconected one axis and plugged in their rotary. The one thing is making sure your axis is NO longer than the diameter of your project. That way it works. (I guess as I am righting this, you would need to configure steps correctly, so some research would be necessary.) I think lightburn may have a way to do this though!
It would eliminate the need for special software to generate the 4th axis.
Louisiana Hobby Guy has a good video on it. One advantage to using the spare driver is that the beam is held by idling steppers rather than potentially being vulnerable to movement if the machine is bumped. It’s pretty straightforward using lightburn.
I haven’t tried to mill anything. Might get tricky if you remove much material.
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The egg-bot extensions for Inkscape go at this in an interesting way. You define the template for your drawings (in pixels) based on the micro-stepping of your rotational motor, one pixel per micro-step. The recommended template size is 800 pixels tall (pen swing axis) by 3200 pixels wide (rotational axis) as the ebb (controller from Mad Scientist labs) does 16x microstepping on a 200-step-per-rotation motor. No scaling is needed to adjust for items of different diameter.