Problems with raster, using Azteeg X5 and Turnkey's Inkscape plugin

[Jason Barnett]

I have had my laser cutter for about a month, and actually managed to live with the Moshiboard without taking a hammer to it. That was until Friday, when I had enough and stole the Azteeg X5 from my 3D printer and installed it in my K40.

I have spent the last couple of days trying to get things to work and am almost there. The X/Y motion and endstops worked perfectly first time trying, no problems there. I fought issues with the Laser Fire signal, which turned out to be a glitch in the inkscape plugin AND needing a level shifter to properly trigger the laser. Next, I had to get the PWM to work, which did just fine, once I realized where to change the power setting.

So as far as vectors go, my laser cutter is working great! Rasters are a different story. Every time I try a raster image, the movements are EXTREMELY slow (~1mm/10sec) and just moves diagonally. The laser will fire a little bit, during the attempted raster, but rarely even leaves a mark on paper.

I have tried sending the gcode via pronterface, as well as copying it to the SD card and running it from there, with the same results.

Could someone give me a known good raster gcode file, that I can figure out if it is my computer or my controller board.

I have attached a file, that should be a rasterized 10mm X 10mm square, but does not work on my machine. Anyone want to try it out and post your results?

Any help would be appreciated.

[ajf]

Smoothie ware doesn't support raster yet, it ignores G7 altogether.  Have no experience with raster engraving myself, but I do recall Tim Schmidt mentioning that G7 was a hack to get raster working with LMN Marlin.

You might want to pop in to #smoothieware IRC channel and/or post to Smoothieware Support about adding raster support or workarounds.

regards,

aj 

[Jason Barnett]

ajf,

 That would explain my problems. :)

 I remember reading about Smoothieware not having raster support, but somehow managed to completely forget it! Doh!

 Thank you for your help.

[Arthur Wolf]

Hey !

So, Smoothie doesn't support G7, but we do support the S parameter to modulate laser power.
People use this to transform raster images into G-code and succesfully engrave using Smoothie.
For example : http://fablabo.net/wiki/Raster2Gcode
Some commercial software also works apparently. There may be a plugin for Inkscape too somewhere.
We are getting native raster engraving support soon too.

Cheers.

[Jason Barnett]

Arthur,

 Thanks for the info. I had found another raster-to-gcode converter, but it just modulated speed to do the engraving. I will try this one out tonight. I imagine that it would not be too hard to convert it into an Inkscape plugin if I like it.

Could you possibly define the word "soon"? Are we looking at days, weeks, months ...  Of course, I understand there are no guarantees, just wondering how far along the engraving support project is.

Thanks!

[Arthur Wolf]

We organised a contest ( smoothiecontest.org ), a project for adding engraving won, and we are sending people their boards sometimes next week.

How fast it gets implemented depends on the persons schedule.

[Jason Barnett]

Fair enough. Thanks for the update.