Session 8: Let’s Build A DIY Xtreeem K40 Rotary – Pt 2

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The K40 Extreme Laser Cutter Upgrade Series with Russ Sadler.

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Session 8: Let’s build a DIY Xtreeem K40 rotary attachment.

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Part two. We completed the mechanical build of the rotary device in the last session.

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Today we’ve got quite a lot to do because we’ve got to make some modifications to the machine.

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If you remember, one of the last points I made was that.

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This head is far too long. To allow me to get underneath the head to engrave.

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Well, today we’re going to this alternative head, which is a short version.

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In my first attempt, you can see that I basically modified one of my standard heads here by cutting the side off and making it as narrow as possible.

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I didn’t know how much room I needed at the end here, but look, I’ve got absolutely buckets of room here so I can use my standard lightweight head.

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And that standard lightweight head is the same mounting as this short version.

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Hey, that’s for later. First of all, I had a problem to solve.

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Now, remember that I managed to wreck this x axis stepper motor when I pulled the little brass

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pulley off the end of the shaft and I replaced it with the bigger turbocharged version.

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As I was setting this up. I realized it was giving me different dimensions to this one.

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And although I didn’t really think about it at the time, because I just went into the calibration and recalibrated this motor.

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It turns out that this motor here must be a 0.9 degree per step, as opposed to this one, which is 1.8 degrees per step.

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90% of all the motors on the market at 1.8 steps and I checked this part number, I couldn’t find anywhere.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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I checked the k40 websites and everything that I could see told me that these motors were 1.8 step motors.

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Fine, I originally had two of these motors on it that were working.

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The data on the side of the driver tells me just the number of steps that are being output.

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It doesn’t say whether or not they’re for a 0.9 or a 1.8 stepper motor.

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They are just steps, micro steps. You may remember back to probably our session three,

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maybe it was. When I decided that my driveway was roughly 13mm diameter on both the X and the Y axis.

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And that gave me a circumference of 41mm, which when I installed the drivers,

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I made a conscious decision that I was going to look for a resolution,

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a step resolution of 0.2mm, divide that into 41mm, which is the circumference.

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And that means I need roughly 2050, say, 2000 steps because that was the number that was on the driver.

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So 2000 steps would give me one revolution.

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In reality, 2000 steps divided into 41, roughly 20 microns per step.

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When I put this new driver in, I found that it was giving me twice as much movement in X.

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Well, the reason why it was giving me twice as much movement in X, is because my initial assumption was actually wrong.

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Although I thought I was putting in 0.2 resolution.

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In reality, I was putting in 0.1mm resolution when I asked for 2000 steps.

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Because 400 steps per rev means I’ve got 41 divided by 0.01, which is 4100.

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Let’s just say 4000 steps per revolution.

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So when I set the driver to 2000 steps per revolution, I’m not going to get a whole revolution of the stepper motor.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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I’m only getting half a revolution.

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So this next stage here, which is similar to this one, was not going to give me the right result. In fact, what I’ve got to do,

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I’ve got to divide 2000, which is the steps into half a turn, i.e. half of that, roughly ten microns per step, not 20 microns per step.

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This is the number that’s in my Vendor settings for this new stepper motor.

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And the 0.9, which is now my Y stepper motor, is showing at 10.1 microns as opposed to 10.025.

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So it’s still ten microns basically, ten microns for this one and 20 microns for this one.

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Why I’ve had to understand and explain this problem to you, is because now I’ve got to make a decision.

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Do I need another stepper drive unit to drive the rotary device?

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It will have to drive off the y axis signal.

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But I could divert that signal into another driver, because I might want a different number of steps to drive it.

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So let’s just take a look at what’s going to happen with the rotary set up.

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The wheels are 26mm diameter. So that’s a circumference of roughly 82mm.

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But remember, I’ve got the stepper drive set to 2000 micro steps per revolution.

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So if I take 82mm and divide it by 2000, I get a step resolution of 0.041, 41 microns.

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Now, let’s just step back for a minute to where we started our calibration in session three.

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My decision in session three was nothing to do with the number of steps on the stepper motor itself.

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It was purely to do with dividing the circumference of the wheel into x number of divisions.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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And that number of divisions was 2000. That was the number of steps that I set on the stepper driver.

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I thought I was setting a resolution of 0.02 mm per step,

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but then I had to calibrate the machine and I used the calibration system that’s built into vendor settings.

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And what we did. Was to say, look, here’s what a 100mm looks like.

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Go forth and draw a 100mm.

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And in doing so. It said, okay, a 100mm represents 10,000 steps, but the controller tells me that I’m stupid.

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And in fact, I’ve got a resolution of 0.01, ten microns, not 0.02.

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And it did the same for the Y axis, because both stepper motors were the same.

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So when I changed the stepper motor from 400 steps to 200 steps per revolution, and I didn’t tell the controller that I’d made that change.

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What happened was the controller took ten microns per step.

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And divided into a 100mm and said, ah! You want to move 10,000 steps.

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Well, if I’ve got a resolution of 0.02 times 10,000.

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I’m going to move twice as far as I did when I had a resolution of 0.01.

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And that is why I finished up with, going that far

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in X. So I had to finish up teaching the machine what I wanted it to do.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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I wanted it to do a 100mm. Okay, now go forth and tell me what the computation is.

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And the answer is, ah, I only moved 5000 steps.

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And so therefore now 5000 steps into a 100mm.

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Is 20 microns per step. Everybody’s happy.

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I’ve got my 0.02 resolution.

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And here it is 0.02. The machine works fine.

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Now we’re going to disrupt things because we’ve done this.

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So when I unplug the y axis.

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And plug my rotary into the y axis.

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What is going to happen? We’re hopefully looking for, say, 40 microns per step.

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But what does the vendor settings say? The vendor setting says ten microns per step.

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So it’s going to take ten microns into a 100mm, which is 10,000 steps.

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Times 0.041.

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And in fact, it’s now going to move 400mm and not a

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100mm. So we’ve got a big problem.

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We’ve got three possible solutions.

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One. We could, modify the drawing before we send it to the machine.

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And by that I mean to say we could take our drawing. And we could make it,

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quarter the size in Y. We can put a 25% scaling factor on our drawing in

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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Y. The other alternative will teach the machine what a 100mm of rotary looks like on the circumference of an item?

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And we can find out what this factor is here. Maybe it’s going to be 0.041, 41 microns.

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Now, we could make a note of that number, and every time we use the Rotary encoder,

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we can go into the vendor settings and we can remove the 10 microns and overwrite with 41 microns.

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Yeah, that’s okay. But the chances are you might forget what’s going on.

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Once we know this factor and we’ve generated a new set of vendor data, what we could do is we could save that.

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as a rotary Vendor Settings. So we can write that back as a different set of vendor settings.

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And then every time we use the rotary we will just load in the rotary vendor settings.

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And when we use the machine as a linear machine, we’ll put in the linear vendor settings.

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One will be 10 microns and the other will be 41 microns.

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That, I think is probably the neatest way. Okay, that’s

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all the theory out of the way. Let’s get on with the mechanics and make sure we can get the mechanics working.

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Look, we’ll just take this head off. There are nuts behind here which are captive.

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There are nuts behind here which are loose. And at the moment I’ve got an additional security screw, down at the bottom here.

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So to take the belt off, we’ve got to first loosen the tension with this idler pulley.

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So we’ve got to push this to the back here where we’ve got a hole, which allows us to loosen these small screws off here and let the tension off.

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So unscrew the screws until they’re just flush with the bracket.

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Just loosen these off and slide the belt out.

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Now, here are those M4 nuts that I was telling you about on the back that are captivated here.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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The reason why we keep these two plates separate.

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That’s because to get this fitting in, we need to take the plate apart, because, look, it’s captivated in that hook there.

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Because it makes life a lot easier with these nuts.

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that have got to go in here. Can I just suggest that you put a piece of tape over the back of this plate and then just trim it off with a knife?

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Now that’s going to make your life a lot easier when it comes to holding these nuts in here.

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Now, I’ve got to countersink these four holes here. Should fit neatly over there. Before you put this all together.

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We need to pop that, in that little hook there and then that sits over the front and retains it.

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Now, it’s supposed to be wobbly like that, as I showed you in in the session when we assembled this head originally.

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We’ve got some special oversize M3 washers there, which are a very important part of this assembly.

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Now you just have to punch some holes through the back there to let the M3 fixing screws, the four M3 fixing screws through.

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Now, to fix this onto the bracket there, we’ve got some M3 by 10mm long countersunk screws.

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Now, I’m not the least bit frightened of taking this apart again and again and again, because hey, setting up the beam is not a big issue.

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And in fact, what we’re doing here, we haven’t got to set X up again.

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We haven’t got to set Y up again. All we’ve got to do is just tweak Z into place.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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So we just pull those washers forward and put the belt behind it.

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What we’ve got to try and do, is to get the belt as evenly as possible between the washers.

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This second one is going to have a lot of slack on it now because I’ve changed the position in which I’m mounting the belt.

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It was previously here and now it’s out here. So we’ve got a lot more slack on this belt.

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But don’t let that worry you, because it’s not going to get in the way of anything.

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We tuck that behind the washers as well. We put it

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snug, not tight. Because we’ve got our tensioning system at the end to tighten the belt up.

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So now we can get at the end here and we can tighten up our screws and put tension on the belt.

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And we can have quite a lot of tension on this belt, because it is a very small, lightweight belt and it’s got a big job to do.

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See? You can see, it’s got quite a lot of tension on there. Previously

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I had these fixed on with cap head screws, but I’m going to be using pan head screws now and I’ll explain why in a few seconds.

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Now, the reason I’m changing to pan head screws is because there is one screw just here.

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This bottom right hand screw, which is pretty close to the lens tube.

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If I have a cap head screw, it touches and collides with the lens tube. The pan head screw because it’s a lot more lower

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profile, misses the corner of the lens tube. We’ll have to make some interesting adjustments here to make sure that I can get my butterfly clamp in.

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But that all works OK. You can’t use a conventional lens tube and nozzle because it projects way too low.

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So let’s just temporarily pop this back in here.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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You can see now I’m comfortably above here, but I haven’t got that much room for a nozzle.

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So what I’ve got here, it’s a short nozzle, which I’ve turned the bottom off of, so that I’ve got a nice 6mm hole in the bottom there.

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And in addition to that, I’ve turned the outside down so that it’s 24 millimeters diameter, the same diameter as the lens tube itself.

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We can see there, I’ve got plenty of room underneath that nozzle now. I can put my finger under there.

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So that we’ve got at least 12 or 15mm under there.

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All right. Now. I can, it’ll probably get even more because I’ve got to find out

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now where the right place is to re locate the head.

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Our next task is to realign the beam, and that’s going to be easy.

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All we need is an empty lens tube, and I’ve got my little setting jig here, which we’ll pop onto the bottom of the lens tube.

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And we’ll put this head roughly in the mid position and tighten it up.

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Okay. So let’s get my little targets out. Pop that one in the corner there.

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Oh, can’t do that now. We’ve got to drop it down.

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I’ve got to be down below that second point here.

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Because there’s two material thicknesses there and that sits in the corner just nicely and locates it perfectly. OK.

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So we drop it down to the bottom. The one at the back is our target. Across.

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Which should be that one. Bit more? Pretty reasonable.

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And then we’ve got to go backwards. So I’ve got to let that one off. Difficult to get that target out of there.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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So we just do that with an allen key. Another target.

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Now, remember, this is an iteration process, so we’re not going to be able to do it in one. We can

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turn that target over and try it again.

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This mirror is in the same position, this way. All right? So technically, I should still be in line with mirror number two.

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And this gives the impression. So the only thing I’ve got to do now is to get the beam on centre.

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Now, bear in mind, at the moment, the centre is here.

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It’s too low on this mirror.

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And to get it to move across and catch the beam, I’ve got to drop that mirror down.

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So we’ll just undo these and push this down. A bit more.

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And just lock that up. And I would say that that’s just about spot on.

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Now we’ve got the alignment correct. We can actually do our other alignment at the top here and there we go.

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Pretty good. So you can see, it didn’t take very long at all to realign that

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head. Let’s just tighten things up. We’ll just do one final check, just to make sure we haven’t pushed anything out of line. Pretty good.

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So that’s how complicated it is to set the beam up after we change the head.

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So now what we’ve got to decide is what sort of lens are we going to put in there?

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I’m going to try an inch and a half gallium arsenide lens in there. So I’ve got an inch and a half lens in there.

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And I think that this will just about snuggle onto there.

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Yeah, that’s perfect. I can very quickly just check where the focal point is.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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Yeah, it looks to be about 7 or 8mm below the nozzle, which is just about perfect.

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I’ve made one of my acrylic drill jigs to spot through the fixing holes.

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There we go. That’s. That’s the location for the socket.

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Well, I’ve connected up the stepper motor now, into its little socket.

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And that we’ll turn it on and make sure it’s all working as it should be, because all I’ve done is really just connected,

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put a connector in that line. So this should now work exactly as it did before.

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Yep, that does. What we’re going to do now is to turn the power off.

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Disconnect this one. The Y is not going to move anymore.

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And I connect in the stepper motor. Now, remember, the stepper motor at the moment is going to run far too fast.

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So let’s just see what happens to the stepper motor. Now, the Y will not move, but the X will do.

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And that’s good, because at the moment I need to push this

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Y switch to set a zero? Let’s put the stepper motor there, where you can see it whirring.

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And we turn it on. And that stepper motor is busy wizzing away very quickly.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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And now I’ve set zero. You’ll notice this didn’t jump until I’d set that zero.

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It was waiting for a second zero. We found this zero first.

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It was then waiting for zero on there. So now when I press the Y button.

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I’ve got control of that, but it’s running far too fast.

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Now I’ve got no means of calibrating at the moment. We know the calibration is about 41 microns per step.

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We’re go into vendor settings. We bring up these settings here.

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We will first of all read. Okay, now read takes in the existing machine vendor settings.

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Then we go to the y axis now and you’ll notice the step length is 10.1, which is what we expected it to be for the Y axis.

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We’re going to change that to 41.

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Don’t know what the real number is, but we just put 41 in there and we will save that. And I’ll put in here K40 rotary, save parameter, success.

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So I’m now going to write that back to the machine. I haven’t changed the x.

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The X was still be about 20 if I remember right, there it is 20.

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Okay?

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So we write that back to the machine and now we should find the stepper motor is running much slower. So I’ve brought the stepper motor over to the front here.

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So you can see it. And as I go, you see it’s now running a lot slower and it runs a certain number of revolutions.

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Just stick a bit tape on there. And we’ll count

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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roughly how many revolutions it does? One, two, three.

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Two and three quarters. Now, two and three quarters,

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is if you remember, the circumference is about 80mm.

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82mm. So there’s 160 plus three quarters.

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So that’s about another 60, so that’s about 240mm of circumferential travel.

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So if we go and look at the Y axis, you’ll find that the breadth there look, 235, we worked 240mm.

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Okay. So the breadth is the distance that this wheel will travel.

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Let’s assume that we want to do a 90mm diameter cup and we want to engrave it all the way round.

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We don’t want it to stop halfway. So how far is the conference, around a

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a 90mm cup? Well 3 x 9 are 27 plus another 8, roughly.

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So if we said about 320mm, what we can do, we can set that breadth now, the Y-breadth to 320.

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Okay. So now we should find that this rotates more revs.

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One, two, three, four. Nearly. There’s nothing to set the zero on here at all.

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That is why we’ve got the button on the side of the machine so that I can press it and set zero.

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Or we could fiddle with the Y microswitch at the back and set zero. Which is what I did this time round.

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I haven’t yet connected up my zeroing red button, but all it’s going to do, is to link in to the same place that the Y microswitch is linked in.

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So I can just copy the Y microswitch with my red button.

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We’ll write that back. Okay.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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And now, if I want to put my other system back,

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what I’ve got to do is open and look, there’s a setting there called K40 Xtreeem RDV set and this is input parameter success.

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Okay. We’ve read it into here. We’ve now got to write it back into the machine.

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So now I’ve put the original settings back into the machine.

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If I want to put the other settings into the machine, I’ve got to open the rotary settings.

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Input success. But it will only input to here.

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It’s not input to the machine. Okay.

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And now I’ve got to write that back to the machine. And now I shall find that my Y is 41, I don’t know whether 41 is the right dimension.

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We’ve got to calibrate this now against something.

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And we’ll work out what we’re going to do. We do it with a rotary motion.

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I’ve taken a couple of hours out. And finished off a couple of jobs.

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First of all, I’ve now got my zero switch connected up.

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So when we start the thing up, I should be able to zero it with that.

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I don’t think I showed you the sockets that I’m using. All right.

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They’re not normally used for this sort of application, but hey, I’m quite happy to use anything that’s convenient and cheap.

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And that’s what these are. And they’re small. I didn’t want a great big four way connector hanging out inside here.

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So we’ve got one of these connected in here. And you saw me drilling the holes and cutting the shape out for it.

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And here are my two connectors that are either the X Y drive when I plug it in there.

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Or the rotary drive when I plugged that one in. The sharp eyed ones among you might recognize a small change that I’ve made, hmmm possibly a large change.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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But actually it took very little time and effort because the design was very easily adaptable.

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So let’s just turn it on and see what happens. Now, first of all, as I said, we should not get any movement in Y because the Y axis is disconnected.

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But we should see it trying to find an X zero over there.

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And this is running away. Oh!

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My reset switch doesn’t work for some reason or other. I’ll have to work out why shortly.

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There we go. So, it revolves very, very nicely

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thank you. Now! I have to admit, when it had an idler wheel over there, it didn’t rotate very consistently.

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It was stop,/ start Not very good at all.

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If you look closely, what you’ll see now. We’ve got two stepper motors, one driving up hill and one driving downhill.

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And that works absolutely perfectly. And I’ve got a piece of masking tape on there.

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I’m just going to draw a straight line in the Y axis here, I’ll press down the control key.

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We select the line tool. Okay? And we’ll just give that a dimension in Y of 100mm.

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So I don’t know which way. So that’s Y-zero and.

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It’s going to go that way.

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Okay. So that’s Y=Zero and we’ll press the origin button and I’ll just set the parameters for that line. We’ll keep the power low at about 15%.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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We’ll have the speed at about 15. Okay.

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Now, I purposely haven’t got the laser switched on at the moment. We’ll just rotate that around to there.

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Now I’ll turn the laser on and run the program. Let’s take that piece of tape off there.

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I would say that it’s about 97.2.

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So back in the vendor settings. So we’ve got to repeat before we get the right option.

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Y step length? Press

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the three little buttons. Out measured length was 97.2.

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Okay. And watch our 41 change now.

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To 39.8. It’s still nearly 40 microns pertstep.

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Now we can write that back into the vendor settings and we will also save that now as

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rotary. Save. Do you want to replace it?

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Yes. Okay.

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So now we’ve got all the settings that we want, at the moment for the rotary.

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I really don’t want to accelerate too quickly between the line scans just in case we lose anything trying to accelerate the mass.

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So I think we’ll bring that acceleration right down to 5000 and we will save that.

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Rotary. Okay.

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And we’ll write it back to the machine as well. Write. Now we can just do a quick test here.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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Test text there we go, that will do. Now, obviously, we don’t want it,

272
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we don’t want it to sit that way. So we’re going to have to rotate it before we send it to the machine.

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So we rotate it by -90. It’s just it will be much easier if we position the head here relative to the top edge of the mug itself.

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It went that way backwards. So realistically, what we ought to do, is we ought to set the

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system setting to the bottom corner because that’s where we’re going to start.

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Okay. Now, as I said, I’ve not set that head to anything special. That is just roughly 7 or 8mm.

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This is engraving. We don’t have to be too accurate.

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This is not photo engraving. This is just normal engraving. I’m pressing the up button.

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And it’s as far clockwise. It’s as far that way as we can go.

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So these buttons effectively on the screen, the buttons on the keyboard are moving that work in the right direction.

281
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So when I press the down button, the work moves this way.

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Let’s see what we get shall we? Frame

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oversize, work paused. Okay.

284
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So maybe it wants to work the other way. So we do an escape and we move that to there.

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And we try again. Press the origin button there.

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Press stop and it should go back to zero, which it does.

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Let’s increase the power. We’ll make the speed 400 and we’ll take the power up to 20%.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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And we’ve done the letters backwards.

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Very interesting. Now, what I didn’t show you.

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I’ve got a little plastic bubble here. I set that end up there to the right height so that it’s level in this area here where we’re going to engrave.

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Okay. Now, I could have done it by measuring the gap between here and here and here and here.

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But I thought that was a quick and simple way.

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It doesn’t have to be too super accurate for engraving.

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In fact, generally for engraving, you get better results, especially on organic materials.

295
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If you’re maybe three or four millimetres out of focus, you get a better burn and less of a cut. As it happens.

296
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we can still get air assist in here look, and we could go a little bit higher, a little bit bigger on this diameter because we’ve got room to spare.

297
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And we could come up another maybe 10mm here.

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Now, the big difference you can see is that we’ve got two stepper motors instead of a stepper motor and an idler.

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Because as I said to you, when I had the idler on, I was getting very inconsistent

300
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travels. This has fixed that. I’m extremely pleased with the end result now. So all I’ve got to is tidy up my drawings.

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And um, well you can have a go at making one for yourself if you want.

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I don’t know so much about this.

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It may well be that I shall have to supply this at the moment until CloudRay decides whether or not they want to get involved with this project or not.

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I mean, technically it’s good news for them because, hey, you might want to buy two stepper motors from them.

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These are matched stepper motors, so you wouldn’t be able to use the 0.9 stepper motor that you had off of the X-axis.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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So it will require two matched stepper motors.

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Because if you look carefully, you’ll see that I’m running both of those cables into here.

308
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So both stepper motors are being fed by this connector here.

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I’ve got to go and sort out what’s going wrong with this.

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Now it’s two wires and my stupidity.

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How difficult can that be to overcome? Probably about as difficult as

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sorting out what’s gone wrong here? I think that’s probably in the vendor settings, just direction.

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So let me go and check that, shall we? So that’s the great advantage of having a completely separate rotary set

314
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of vendor settings. We can change this however we like and it won’t affect the normal running of the machine. Vendor settings, read.

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Because until I say read, I can’t write it back to the machine.

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So Y. Polarity, direction polarity.

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Positive. Right.

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I’m not going to save it yet until we’ve tested it. So it’s write.

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And that’s gone back into the machine. And let’s run the test again.

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shall we? We see it’s now doing exactly what we want.

321
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So if I press zero there, let’s see whether or not it responds correctly.

322
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Yes. So it’s now moving away from zero.

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And it’s doing exactly what we asked it to do. I set zero there and it’s

324
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moved up and scanned correctly.

325
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Nice dark glass bottle. Let’s see what we can do on this one.

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Move the gantry out of the way and we move these into a much closer position.

Transcript for Let’s Build a K40 Xtreeem DIY Rotary – Pt 2 (Cont…)

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So we’ve got, one, two, three, three holes.

328
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One, two, three, four holes.

329
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And then these. Well, we should want these in as close as possible, I should think. And raise that

330
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end up until we get a bubble in the middle. Put on the end

331
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stop. It can’t move either way.

332
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There’s a serration on the bottom edge here. That’s what it is, that’s what you can hear.

333
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So we move that across. So we can drop that down to within about seven or eight millimetres of the work,

334
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roughly on the centerline. I’ve wound that right the way forward onto the zero position.

335
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So in fact Y is 235. That’s what it says on the keyboard.

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If I press my origin there. We go 400 and 50 power.

337
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Okay. I didn’t set my text on this screen correctly.

338
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So what I should have done is rotated this 180 degrees.

339
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Okay. That’s enough testing just to show you that it all works.

340
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And if you want to do smaller objects, you might be able to get away with a standard lens tube, because that comes quite high.

341
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And then it gives you a lot of adjustment up and down,

342
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and you’ve got a full range of depth from 90 millimetres down to pencils, drumsticks, whatever you want.