Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times
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The Concise RDWorks Learning Lab with Russ Sadler.
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Session 30: Optimizing Engraving Cycle Times.
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Many moons ago, I seem to remember telling you that engraving was a big subject.
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Now there is one feature that is common to all types of engraving and that is scan.
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Backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards.
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Whether you are doing it for logos, text or as latterly photographs,
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and the amount of time that it takes to go backwards and forwards and gradually scan down a picture is dependent upon so many different factors.
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And here are the six key factors that will influence the cycle time for an engraving.
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So we’re going to look at these two factors here to start with, and they are tied in with this motor power as well.
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But particularly, I want to talk about these two factors here. So you’ve got a good understanding of what these are all about.
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Right? Let me explain my dodgy drawing here. First of all, what is acceleration?
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How many millimetres per second per second you are changing your speed by?
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I’ve got a simple task for this laser machine to perform.
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I want it to draw a line. It’s a scan line, 300 mm long.
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But the thing about scanning is when you specify in your scanning parameters that you want to run at 300mm a second,
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it will run at 300mm a second over the length of that line.
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But it doesn’t just instantly start off at the beginning of this line,
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300mm a second and stop. No, it has to accelerate up to 300mm a second, then draw the line and then stop.
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Turn around, accelerate up to 300mm a second.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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Draw the line on the way back and decelerate again.
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So there are three phases to drawing a scan line the acceleration, the drawing and the deceleration.
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So let’s just take a look at how this 300mm long line, how long it’s going to take with different accelerations.
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Now, acceleration is the change of speed.
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And it’s the change of speed in this case of millimeters per second per second.
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I’m going to set the acceleration to 300mm, a second, a second.
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And at the end of the first second, I’m traveling at 300mm per second.
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If I was to go on to another second, it would be 600mm a second.
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But I’m not because I’ve reached my goal of 300mm a second speed, which is my line, your speed.
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Now I’m going to draw a line which is 300mm long. Well, how long is it going to take me to draw that line?
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Well, I’m already traveling at 300mm a second and I’ve got a 300mm long line,
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so it’s going to take me one second to draw that line, which is one second across the bottom of that time here.
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Okay. And then it’s going to take another second here.
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To drop back to zero at the end of the line, so it’s taken a total of three seconds to draw my 300 mm long line.
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Now if I change the acceleration only to 150 millimeters a second,
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in other words it’s half the acceleration. It’s going to take twice as long to reach 300mm a second.
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So it’s going to take two seconds to reach 300 mm a second.
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But once I’m at 300mm a second, it’s still only going to take one second to draw my line.
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And there it is one second. But it’s going to take another two seconds to decelerate back down to zero again.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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So here it takes three seconds to draw 300mm line. And here it takes five seconds to draw a 300 mm line.
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So it’s not double the time because I’ve got half the acceleration.
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That’s just an illustration that the faster you can accelerate, the more time you can save on a cycle.
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I mean, you could run this at twice the speed. Okay.
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But the problem is to run it at twice the speed, you’ve got to have the acceleration up to that speed.
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And now comes another issue, which is the motor power itself.
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Now the problem with a stepper motor is the faster the stepper motor runs, the less torque or the less ability it has to drive.
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And so consequently, we’re very quickly going to hit a ceiling where our aspirations, 600mm
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a second at a certain acceleration are not possible because we don’t have the power in the motor.
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The faster the motor runs, the less powerful it becomes. So we’ve got a very strange set of circumstances here which play together.
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There is no way that I can begin to describe that situation to you on paper.
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We’re going to have to go to the laser machine and we’re going to have to experiment with these three factors.
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We can’t change the stepper motor power. We’ve got a certain stepper motor.
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But what we can do, we can play with the engraving speed and the motor acceleration.
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And that will, in fact, affect the cycle time. Right, we’re going to start off by taking a quick look at the head that I’ve got
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on this laser machine and the sort of head that you might have on your machine.
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Now this is a fairly typical head that you would have on the laser machine.
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And if we take a look at it, the weight of it around about 300 grams.
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I’ve completely redesigned the head to make this into what I call a lightweight head.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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All we’ve really got on here is the lens tube and as little mass as possible to
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just hold a very lightweight mirror plate in place as opposed to this heavy one.
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With all these big brass fittings on it and this big lump of aluminium here and this big fitting down at the bottom.
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So everything has been lightened so that this is roughly a third of the mass of this one. You might say, well, what’s the benefit of that?
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The reason why I’ve changed the head is because Isaac Newton told me to. Look here’s Newton’s second law of motion.
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It clearly says force equals mass times acceleration.
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OK, so it’s a formula. What on earth does that mean? Well, look, I’ve got a stepper motor on this laser machine, which is the force,
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and at the moment it is doing a job and we know that if I was to use this head.
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The laser machine would be set up and capable of driving this head backwards and forwards at, say, 600mm a second with a certain amount of acceleration.
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So let’s put this head into the equation and say force of one.
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And it doesn’t matter what the numbers are. Force of one with a mass of one gives me a certain acceleration.
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So the equation is balancing look, one times one equals one, which is exactly what the equation says.
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Now, if I can reduce this mass by 50 percent, then here’s what the equation looks like.
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I can reduce the mass by 50 percent to half.
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If I keep the force the same without asking the motor to do any more or less work, then I can make the acceleration twice as fast.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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So in my situation here, where I’ve got a force of one because I’ve not changed the stepper motor.
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I’ve gone down to naught point three three,
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so I can multiply the acceleration by three. So I could put three times as much acceleration into this head as I can into this head.
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So that immediately gives me the opportunity to run the machine and generate much faster cycle times.
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OK, let’s go and look in RDWorks. We need to go to file.
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Vendor settings, and you will get the opportunity here to put in a password, which is RD8888.
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Enter. And now it lets you into a magical secret part of the software.
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So we need to read. And there it goes. And now the numbers that are in this chart here, are the numbers that are in my machine.
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This is vendor settings and in vendor settings most of the numbers in here are safe numbers that
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the vendor ,the seller thinks you shouldn’t exceed. Right now over on the side panel here you find we’ve got a tab called user.
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Now in user, you’ve got all sorts of other settings.
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Now these are settings that you are allowed to play with, the vendor settings are basically safety limits that you cannot play with.
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So the vendor says, Yeah, I’ll let you go up to say, 100mm a second maximum speed.
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You can put a thousand millimeters a second speed in here,
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but it won’t allow you to go to a thousand millimeters a second because the restraint has been defined by the vendor at 100 millimeters a second.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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So you can put what numbers in you like here, but if the vendor settings are wrong, they will have no effect on your machine.
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So that’s an important, that’s an important fact
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you must understand. If you want to fiddle with these numbers, you may well have to go into your vendor settings and make big adjustments.
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It doesn’t mean to say that the machine is going to explode and burst into flames.
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So we’re going to be interested mainly in the X scan because when you’re doing a scanning operation, the movements in Y are very, very, very small.
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And you don’t have any serious acceleration problems. So we’ve got maximum speed 2000
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Wow, that’s very high.
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Normally on your machine, you’ll probably find that that set to something like about maybe 500, 600. 2000 is a dream.
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So I’m not worried about it, because I’m going to go maximum on this machine, we might be able to get up to 1500….
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Might. So let’s not worry too much about that number.
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Just make sure that it is high. OK, and then we’ve got acceleration here, set to 40000. 40000?
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You may well find that yours is set to 20000.
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Now, I know that this machine has already been set to quite reasonable limits for the weight of the head, the mass of the head.
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So we might not have too much change to make on this machine, but we’ll give it a try.
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Now on our user settings, we’ve got cut parameters which we’re not interested in.
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What we’re more interested in is these things here, which is sweep parameters.
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They call it sweep, but it’s basically scanning. OK, so we’ve got a start speed, which is low.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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That’s not a problem. Start speed? Mm a second. Then what we’re interested in is this x acceleration.
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Now, at the moment, the X acceleration is only set to 20000. And remember, we’ve got a limit in the vendor settings of 40000.
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So what are we’re going to do, to start with is just
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use the settings that are in the machine and see what we’ve got. Now, to help me in this task what I’ve done.
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I’ve drawn a little test rectangle here and I’ve got it set to 400mm the second to start with, scanning with a power of 25 percent.
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But what I’ve done here, I’ve got the interval set to point five. My box is a 100 mm wide.
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The head is probably going to travel across this way to start with and finish up over
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here, at a point where it can accelerate from zero up to 400 millimetres a second,
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which is the speed that I’ve asked it to scan at. It will then scan across here at 400mm a second turn off,
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but it’ll carry on traveling this way and decelerating to zero from 400 millimetres a second.
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Then it will accelerate back up to 400 millimetres a second and scan this way.
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So at the end of every stroke, there’s going to be this over travel. To try and see the over travel,
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I’ve got a little trick. There are two tricks that I could use, but this is the easiest one for you to understand.
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In my bearing here, I’ve got a little groove. I’m going to sit this drill in the groove so that it can just move backwards and forwards.
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Once the machine is running, you’ll see what I’m going to do. I’m going to try and find the point at which the bearing stops.
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In other words, I’m going to use this like little end stop. If you’re going to try this, don’t do it from here.
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Look, you’ve got a laser beam coming across here, and you’ll very quickly find out that laser beams appear to be warm.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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So make sure you put your hand over the back of the head and do this adjustment. And I gradually just find the point at which that drill just touches
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the head. Now I’m letting my program run to the end because I want to find out how long it took to do that program.
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So we’ve got to put several pieces of information on here 400 millimetres a second.
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We know that the acceleration was 20000 millimetres per second squared.
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And now what we got to do is find out what the over travel is. So I’ll just measure that over travel,
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and that’s about six point four. So the next thing we’ll do, we’ll try and run this at 800mm a second.
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Just touching, just there. So we’re now running at 800mm a second.
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So we’ve doubled the speed. But we haven’t halved the cycle time.
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And in practice, to be honest, I don’t think I can run engraving at much more than 800 millimeters a second.
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We will go faster than that. We will see where this thing finishes up.
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Let’s try running at 1200 millimetres a second. OK.
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So immediately you heard there something going wrong, and I’ve just press the pause button.
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Because it’s lost steps. It will not run at twelve hundred millimetres a second with that acceleration.
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Press reset.. OK, so now we’re back in order.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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You heard something went wrong. It’s not dangerous. It’s just you need to stop the machine.
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So we change the speed back to a thousand. Yes.
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It runs at a thousand. And the over travel is now twenty nine point eight and the cycle time is 11 seconds.
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But hang on. It was 11 seconds when we’re at 800mm a second.
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So we’ve gone 200mm a second faster,
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we’ve got more over travel. But we finish with the same cycle time.
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And this is one of the points I wanted to make to you that the amount of over travel
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and the speed will cross over at some point in time and the faster you travel,
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the more over travel you have, the more wasted the time you have. Because of the acceleration,
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up to a thousand millimetres a second. Now what we’ll do now,
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we will keep a thousand millimeters a second and we’ll see whether we can push
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the acceleration up to decrease this time and get a benefit on the cycle time.
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Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll change just the four, backspace, to three.
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Thirty thousand. Write.
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And now we’ll will read what’s in memory.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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Now we’ve got it. Now bear in mind, at a thousand millimetres a second, we were right on the verge of the power of the motor.
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We’re nowt going to ask it to accelerate even faster. It’s going to fail.
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I can absolutely tell you it’s going to fail. But let’s give it a try.
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There you go. We will leave the acceleration. And we will now back the speed off to 800 hundred. So at 800 at the higher acceleration works fine.
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Fourteen point eight. Now we’ve managed to get the cycle time down to 10 seconds.
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And all we’ve done. 800mm a second, nineteen point eight, 11 seconds. Exactly the same,
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800mm a second, and that’s fourteen point eight as opposed to nineteen point eight.
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Because we’ve got a greater acceleration,
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we got to the run speed faster in a shorter distance and we’ve managed to get another second off the cycle time.
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I mean, most people won’t want to run,. I don’t think at 800mm a second.
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My guess is that they’re probably going to be closer to 600 mm a second maximum.
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Because you just haven’t got enough power with 70 watts to produce decent engraving.
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Let me push the power up to 99 per percent because remember, I can do that on this machine.
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800mm a second. At the moment, we’ll leave the focus exactly where is.
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We’ll drop the table down by about 3mm
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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It’s not exactly dark, is it?
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Let’s try it on a piece of plywood. Full power at 800mm a second. Let’s change the speed to 600 millimetres a second.
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A slight difference in the colour, by dropping it down 200mm a second.
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Let’s just change the pitch between the lines, because at the moment this is half millimetre pitch and I’ve just about filled that up nicely.
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So they’re about a half mill wide lines at the moment to get an even, quite nice even engraving. If I go to point two.
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I’m going to be over burning the lines.
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And so consequently, you’d expect that double burning would give me a darker burn, from point five to point two, but we’re still on 600 mm a second.
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There is a very, very small change in the colour. We’re now up to 28 seconds for something that can be done in 11 seconds.
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And we got no benefit to show from it.
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Now you’ve been through enough of the early engraving to try and understand why I’m not getting a colour change.
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If I drop that to 200mm a second, I probably will get a different color.
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Now, the amount of over travel we’ve got now that we’re traveling very, very slowly, is almost nil.
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It’s no more than about two millimetres.
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So look 400 at 30000 was a slight change of colour, but we had five mm over travel. 67 seconds down to 37 seconds just for a 200mm
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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a second change. I doubt whether we shall want to run this machine at more than 600 millimeters a second.
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So it would make more sense to try and wring the absolute maximum acceleration out of this machine, rather than play with acceleration for high speed.
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So I’ve pushed the acceleration up now to 40000 and we’re going to bring the speed to 600 and see what happens.
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Six hundred mm a second, 40000 millimetres a second, a second – thirty eight seconds.
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So we’ve got greater acceleration, faster speed.
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And it’s taking a second longer. OK.
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I think my point is proven there is an optimum combination of speed and acceleration that will give you an optimum cycle time.
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So that’s one of the things that you need to play with.
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Now the other thing that I must point out to you and I did mention this before is this. There will be exactly the same over travel,
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nine millimetres of over travel, 600 mm a second, 40000 acceleration and cycle time.
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Every time you do a scan, you’ve got nine millimeters of over travel each end, which is wasted time.
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But look how many scans we’ve got. Compared to the number of scans on this one.
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And that’s where your extra time it’s the dead time at the end of the stroke.
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So even though you might like to see pictures on your machine the right way up, turn them on their side.
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Make sure the aspect ratio is always landscape and not portrait.
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Size of picture will have an effect on the cycle time.
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Orientation of the picture will have an effect on the cycle time. The resolution of the picture cannot be changed.
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This is point one. And therefore, you have to have a point one line interval. That applies to bitmap pictures, but it does not apply to text.
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If you’re doing filled text, it doesn’t matter about the resolution.
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What you’re really interested in, then, is maybe the speed of your text, depending on the size of the text.
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If you’ve got large text, you can do what I’ve done here, which is drop the focus down.
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You could increase the size of the line spacing if you increase the size of the line spacing from point one to point two,
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you’ve almost halved the time that it’s going to take to do the job.
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I can only give you all these demonstrations of this information, at the end of the day.
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The decision will be yours on the optimum speed that you could run your machine at.
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Every machine will be different.
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But I’ve given you hopefully the tools and the demonstrations to show you how to go about wringing the absolute optimum from your machine.
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It looks as though on this machine, the optimum acceleration is 30000 and not 40000.
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Well, the answer is thirty seven seconds.
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So the acceleration is making no difference when we get down to these very small numbers,
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times (Cont…)
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so we may as well play safe and set this machine back to thirty thousand and know that it will run all
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the way up to about 800 millimeters a second and not compromise what we’re doing here at slow speed.
Transcript for Speed Up Laser Engraving – Optimising Engraving Cycle Times
