0:00welcome to another session with my
0:01little tangerine tiger
0:04baby tabby cat that i discussed last
0:07time
0:08but today we’ll find out a little bit
0:11more about
0:12what this little beast can do um
0:15i’m very confident that it will run
0:19fast i’m not quite too confident now
0:23that the rf laser will be able to keep
0:25up with this
0:28but we will find out
0:33so the first thing we’ve got to do is to
0:36jump into the vendor settings and
0:38oh no the first thing i’ve got to do
0:42is to apologize to who knows how many
0:45people
0:46it’s been a hectic couple of weeks
0:48trying to get the new parts of this
0:50shipped to different people now
0:54lots of people have wanted parts many
0:56different combinations of parts
0:58and look i’ve told you before i’ve only
1:01got two grey cells left and sometimes
1:03things slip down between those gray
1:04cells so if
1:06you happen to be one of the people that
1:08i have somehow appear to have
1:10not ignored please excuse me will you
1:13write again and remind me that hey i
1:16have ignored you
1:18b you’re still interested in something
1:21and i will deal with it because the rush
1:22is now
1:24more or less over and i think i can
1:26concentrate on just one or two things at
1:28a time
1:29now if you’ve ordered a mark ii head you
1:32will require
1:33some of these targets to help you set up
1:36with
1:36now quite a few people i think most
1:39people
1:40i’ve sent a copy of the targets to even
1:43those people sometimes with a mark one
1:45head which these won’t fit
1:46so if you have not got any of these
1:49targets by the time you come to use your
1:51mark ii head please contact me again
1:54and i will send you the file so you can
1:56make some apologies over
1:58let’s get back to the current project
2:00the primary essence of this machine
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
2:03is to be an engraving machine a fast
2:05engraving machine
2:06we don’t need speed for cutting we only
2:09need
2:10speed for engraving so what i’ve got on
2:12here i’ve got my compound lens
2:14so i can get the thinnest possible line
2:16and we’re going to do a very
2:18simple test on here to start with to see
2:20how the machine is configured
2:21from the back so i’ve just set that up
2:24to
2:25about 11.2 i have not got any extraction
2:29on at the moment because we’re not going
2:30to produce huge amounts of
2:32smoke i’ve got the power on here set to
2:3525 kilohertz 100
2:38power there’s no pulsing involved at all
2:41this is
2:41exactly like a glass tube laser now but
2:4530 watts
2:48now you can see what’s happening
2:51we’ve got a large amount of over travel
2:54at the end
2:54of the stroke now how much is that over
2:58travel
3:00well let me do another one and i’ll show
3:01you what i’m going to do to measure the
3:03over travel
3:04i’ve just got a drill here which i’m
3:06going to lay in the bearing track i’m
3:08running the program
3:09at 500 millimeters a second that’s the
3:12top speed
3:13that has been allowed on this machine
3:15and i’ll show you where that’s been
3:16allowed
3:18in a few moments so what i’m going to do
3:21is gently
3:22push that
3:29and if you look carefully you’ll see
3:31just there that there’s an
3:33oil mark where the wiper has pushed the
3:36oil
3:37to exactly that place there where my
3:39drill is
3:40i’m going to move very gently onto that
3:43drill
3:43and there we go so now if i put another
3:46pulse down
3:48there that will tell me what the over
3:50travel was between the end of the
3:51program
3:53and that pulse mark so there’s our
3:55starting reference
3:56500 millimeters a second with a 28
3:59millimeter over
4:00travel quite a few you guys will be
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
4:01fairly
4:03reluctant to go in and mess around with
4:05your vendor settings
4:07but let me put your mind at rest file
4:11vendor settings when you go into vendor
4:15settings the first thing you need to do
4:16is press read
4:18and it will read the information back
4:20from the machine
4:22into the pc now when we
4:26take a look at the maximum speed that’s
4:28been set from the factory
4:29it says 500 millimeters a second
4:33do you know what i’m going to change
4:35that
4:36to 2 000 millimeters a second
4:41you’re joking sure you’re joking well
4:45this is only a safety limit it just
4:48means that when i go
4:49elsewhere in the program and ask for
4:512500
4:53it won’t ever do 2500 will only ever do
4:562 000 millimeters a second
4:59okay so it all that does is to set
5:02a safety limit it doesn’t control the
5:05machine
5:09now what else can we change in here
5:10right acceleration
5:13now at the moment the acceleration is
5:14set to five
5:16thousand i’m going to change that to
5:21forty thousand forty 000
5:25and right and we’ve only messed around
5:27with the x-axis at the moment yeah while
5:29we’re in here let’s just have a look at
5:30the y-axis doing the y-axis is set to
5:32400 millimeters a second
5:34but we’re taking a bit of weight off the
5:36x-axis so maybe i’ll reset that to 500.
5:40i’m not going to go
5:41too high on the x on the y-axis because
5:43the y-axis is
5:44quite a lot heavier the acceleration on
5:47there is only set to
5:491500 that’s ridiculous
5:52so i’m going to set that to something
5:54like about
5:555 000 so we’re right
5:59so we’ve just all we’ve done is really
6:01allowed the machine now
6:02if we want to run faster so we can exit
6:06from here
6:07and now we can go and reset things as we
6:09need them in the user tab
6:11the first thing we have to do again when
6:13we get in here is to read and you can
6:15see the maximum acceleration in here at
6:17the moment is set to 3 000.
6:19we’re going to put that up to 20 000
6:23remember 3 000 to 20 000
6:2820 000 if i’ve exceeded
6:32the capability of the stepper motor
6:36to accelerate that fast you will hear it
6:39and see it it’s not dangerous
6:42so don’t get worried run exactly the
6:44same program at 500 millimeters a second
6:47but this time the acceleration factor
6:50has gone from three
6:51to twenty
6:59move on to my drill and
7:02pulse i have demonstrated this before
7:05but now you can clearly see
7:07the effect of acceleration
7:11we had 25 28 millimeters it took to slow
7:14down
7:14stop turn around and come back to do a
7:17scan
7:18look at the relationship between the
7:20distance of
7:21over travel and the distance of actual
7:24scanning
7:25it takes longer to slow down and turn
7:28round than it does to actually do the
7:30scan line itself
7:32and that was done with a 3 000
7:34millimeters
7:35per second per second acceleration
7:39this is the same program with 20
7:42000 millimeters per second per second
7:47i’m not going to push it too much
7:49further than that because
7:51i’m going to now do something
7:52significantly different
7:54i’m going to push the speed up to a
7:56thousand
7:58and see whether or not at a thousand
8:00millimeters a second
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
8:02what the effect is with twenty thousand
8:05millimeters a second a second
8:10acceleration
8:18okay so here we are at a thousand
8:19millimeters a second
8:21and i’m going to now run this with an
8:24acceleration of 30
8:26000 millimeters a second a second
8:30yeah i can see where it is
8:34it’s just there so go from 31 to 23 now
8:41the question is how much further can we
8:43go with the acceleration
8:45should we try 40 000
8:48let’s be silly should we 40 000 you’ve
8:50got to remember that i’ve
8:52lightened this head considerably i’ve
8:53taken all the load off of here and all
8:55we’ve got
8:56is just this one piece of pipe that’s
8:59offering some sort of resistance in that
9:01direction the only mass that we’ve got
9:03is this head here the belt
9:06the inertia of the wheels negligible in
9:10relation to the mass of the head and
9:11we’ll see what happens at
9:1340 000 millimeters a second per second
9:16maybe
9:16it will lose steps now
9:20omg it’s gone down to
9:24about 20. so now
9:29where do we push it to have you ever
9:32seen this machine run anywhere near it
9:341500 millimeters a second
9:37let’s give it a try shall we now
9:41i am expecting step loss this time
9:44because i’m asking it to do something
9:46pretty phenomenal 1500 millimeters a
9:48second
9:49forty thousand acceleration i should
9:52just pause the cycle
9:53if it starts to go bonkers
9:57do you see what i mean you can’t mistake
10:00when it’s losing steps now it’s lost at
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
10:03zero
10:04and we shall have to now reset the
10:07machine so we just do a reset
10:09because it needs to know where zero is
10:11we’ll be a little bit more
10:13um gentle with the machine should we
10:15should we take it to twelve hundred
10:19it’s happy at 1200
10:22okay 1300 millimeters a second
10:29okay so let’s take a look at those
10:30numbers and see what is a reasonable
10:32trade-off
10:33for us we get 23 millimeter
10:36over travel doing a thousand millimeters
10:39a second with a 30
10:41000 acceleration
10:44if we increase that to 40 000 we can
10:46reduce it from 23
10:48to 20. i think that’s about the best
10:53that we found
10:53to be honest
10:57a thousand millimeters a second we start
11:00going up to 1200 millimeters a second
11:02which is a faster speed
11:04but we get more over travel so i don’t
11:06think there’s a net gain there in terms
11:08of cycle time
11:09in mind this is the same program this is
11:12500 millimeters a second
11:15this is a thousand millimeters a second
11:18and this is 1300 millimeters a second
11:21do you notice anything quite significant
11:23that’s happened
11:24the power is the same the focus is the
11:27same acceleration
11:28has no effect on the color
11:31that you see on the pattern this
11:34absolutely confirms what i was telling
11:37you
11:38last time when we were talking about
11:42speed being the major controlling factor
11:46you do not have any control of power on
11:48this machine to get any reasonable color
11:52we can forget 1300 which we could run at
11:56we could even forget a thousand
12:02we’ve run out a puff beyond 500
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
12:07we just don’t have the power to burn
12:10this wood
12:10even with this very very sharp lens
12:13let’s take a look at these under the
12:14microscope
12:16now what we’ve got here is a 0.1 wide
12:20reference line so i think you’ll
12:22probably see that these lines here at
12:24500 millimeters a second
12:27are pretty close to 0.1 because we’re
12:30going in
12:30quite deep and we’re going slow
12:33so the lower power part of the beam the
12:36gaussian shape of the beam
12:38as getting a chance to scorch rather
12:41than
12:42burn okay now that’s at 500 millimeters
12:44a second
12:45let’s move up to a thousand millimeters
12:48a second
12:48and see what the difference is pretty
12:50close to one you’ll notice how
12:53relatively speaking light it is let’s go
12:56up to
12:57thirteen hundred millimeters a second oh
13:00we’re going so fast but look how faint
13:04they are we’re distributing the power
13:07so thinly we’re sharing that power that
13:10we haven’t got any depth of cut there
13:13there’s nothing i can do to increase the
13:16power
13:17because i’m running at 100 power already
13:19i’m afraid that on
13:21hardboard it’s very difficult to see
13:24what’s actually going on
13:25so what i’m going to do i’m going to
13:27change to a piece of card
13:29and i hope that you’ll see the
13:31difference on
13:32a piece of white card just set the focus
13:35to eleven
13:37point two
13:43and run the same thing again
13:50just beside that i’ll run 100
13:58well there is a slight difference
13:59between 100
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
14:01and 50 but let’s go and look at it under
14:05the microscope because maybe
14:07your eye is actually not seeing it quite
14:10correctly
14:11well there they are side by side that’s
14:1450 percent
14:16and that’s 100
14:19not a lot of difference if i
14:22change
14:29this from 25 000 to 1000
14:38okay now we do exactly the same test
14:40again
14:42now we’re running slowly you can see the
14:4550
14:4650 pulses 50 on 50
14:49off but look at the color of the pulse
14:53we’ve changed the frequency and all
14:56we’ve done
14:57is actually change the rate at which the
14:59pulses are going down
15:01we compare that with 50
15:05at 25 kilohertz not a lot of difference
15:09at 100 there is no difference regardless
15:12of the frequency they’re switched on 100
15:16of the time and running 30 watts at 1300
15:20millimeters a second
15:21the only reason we’re getting a change
15:23of color is because of the speed
15:26so let’s back that speed off from 1300
15:29to 500 we’re still on 50 50 remember
15:32still on slow speed the only thing that
15:34we changed
15:35is the speed
15:42so that is 500 millimeters a second
15:45let’s do it at 100 and compare that at
15:48this end
15:54i don’t think we really need any further
15:56proof than that
16:01i mean we can go and look at this under
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
16:02the microscope and it will it will be
16:04black
16:05like that but look as we get faster
16:10they are all approximately the same
16:12color
16:14the big change is when we change the
16:16speeds is one kilohertz
16:18this is 25 kilohertz so the kilohertz
16:22has no effect 50 100
16:2550 100 there is no difference
16:29what i’ve just proved is the theory that
16:31we talked about
16:32last time this machine operates on a
16:34very simple
16:35what they call pwm principle it has a
16:38square wave
16:40which is the pulse width modulation
16:43wave that looks like that that
16:47frequency can range anything from zero
16:50so i’m told to 25
16:54000 hertz cycles a second now to make
16:57life easy for myself
16:59i’ve written a very simple little
17:00program here so we can just instantly
17:02get the results
17:04at a frequency of 25 000 hertz
17:07the pulse length one cycle has 40
17:11micro seconds and if we use 50
17:15power we’ve got 20 microseconds of
17:19on power and 20 microseconds of
17:22off power if this is a 25 000 kilohertz
17:25signal
17:26that’s one cycle and it takes 40
17:31microseconds now this laser
17:35only operates at one power
17:3830 watts whatever the power is that’s
17:41all you get
17:44in this mode of operation there is no
17:46change to the power
17:48at all the power is always
17:5530 watts
17:59and those 30 watts can either be on
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
18:06or off
18:10at the moment this is set here
18:13to be 50 power
18:17on and 50 power
18:20off and that’s what those patterns were
18:24that you saw
18:25the dashes on
18:28dash on dash on
18:32if we move it slow enough the speed is
18:35fast enough
18:36so that we can actually see these on off
18:40pulses
18:42but every one of those pulses is
18:4530 watts now we spoke last time about
18:49damaging material
18:52here’s our piece of material
18:55when we’ve got 30 watts
18:58on we can damage the material by
19:01that amount and those are the dashes
19:05that you’ve seen the only thing is
19:10those dashes are not
19:13dependent upon power
19:18those dashes are dependent upon time
19:22now we can make
19:25the dashes longer or shorter
19:29by changing the percent power
19:33so the percent power is not really
19:36changing the power at all
19:38it’s changing the average power because
19:41if i draw a line through here like that
19:45i’ve got 50 more power there than i have
19:49there
19:50so that 50 and that 50 join up
19:53and we’ve got on average 15 watts
19:58not 30 watts we’ve got 30 watts in a
20:01pulse
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
20:02but on average we’ve got 15 watts
20:05but we’re not using average watts to
20:08drill
20:09this channel we’re making this pit here
20:13with 30 watts
20:16there is nothing here to make a pit so
20:19there won’t be any pits and this is the
20:21point i’m
20:21really trying to get over to you and
20:23approved today
20:25that the depth of this cut here
20:28is dependent upon speed
20:34we’ve got a constant power that’s on
20:37and if it’s constant we should get a
20:39constant depth of cut
20:43the only thing that can change that cut
20:45is either the power which we can’t
20:48change because it’s fixed
20:50or the speed so if we run
20:53over that pit at twice the speed
20:57we’ll get half the depth of cut
21:01and that’s why at 500 millimeters a
21:04second
21:09we get a cut like that and at 1300
21:12millimeters a second
21:14we get a cut like
21:19that a different depth a different color
21:23so the color of the cut the amount that
21:26you burn
21:27has got nothing to do with power
21:30we’re stuck with 30 watts
21:34if we start sharing it out we get less
21:37and less color and we share it out
21:40by running faster it’s exactly like
21:45passing your hand over a candle flame
21:48the faster you pass it over
21:49the less it will hurt the faster you
21:51pass it over the less it will damage
21:55so that means that we’ve got to run this
21:57machine slowly
21:59to get color
Transcript for RF Laser Engraver: What Is The Point Of Hyperdrive? (Cont…)
22:03and that seems to defeat the object of
22:05having a fast machine
22:08yes i’ve shown you the machine can run
22:11very fast
22:12but we’re not going to get any benefit
22:14from running fast
22:16this is not rocket science this is fact
22:20and the big boys are either using a more
22:23powerful laser
22:25to get their results they’re certainly
22:27not using a 30 watt laser
22:30because we’re not going to be able to
22:32run at 1300 millimeters a second get a
22:34decent color
22:36maybe if we add 60 watts we might be
22:38able to do it i think
22:40that’s the main reason why i’m saying
22:41this is less of a tiger and more of a
22:43tabby cat
22:44yeah we can do something but we’re going
22:47to have to do it
22:49at that sort of speed which is not much
22:52different
22:52to what we could do with the standard
22:55co2
22:56glass tube machine but this is just an
22:59initial disappointment which
23:01i theorized last time proved this time
23:04and i’m reinforcing yet again the reason
23:06why
23:08it’s not as dramatic as i thought it
23:11might be
23:13the confusing issue is color comes with
23:17speed and not with percent
23:20power
23:25that doesn’t work that’s about as much
23:28as i’ve got patience for today
23:29i’ve got to go away and have a think
23:31about where we go next
23:34so until the next time thank you very
23:36much
23:37and i’ll catch up with you then
