Buildlog links

[ajf]

Here's a thread for linking to your buildlog.  

[Jeremy G]

K-40 laser upgrades, reflow oven, etc.
Most recent : control k-40 laser with arduino mega/ramps.

www.weistekengineering.com

[DogP]

Here's mine: http://www.projectvb.com/laser_cutter/ ... still running the original board with Corel Draw, so not exactly "open source" yet, but I'm working on it.

DogP

[Jeremy G]

Nice! Hope you don't mind I hijacked a few of your ideas. Funny we bought the same water flow gauge.

[DogP]

Nope, I don't mind at all!  Hopefully I'll get around to stealing some of your ideas soon. ;-)

That is kinda funny about the water flow gauge, though it really was the only one cheap that also included a temperature sensor.  I was hoping to find one that had a flow indicator on the LCD with the temperature (so I wouldn't need to mount the flow gauge in view), but the digital flow sensors were much more expensive. :-/  BTW, if you got the one with the blue backlit LCD... you may need to replace the LCD polarizers to get a reasonable viewing angle... depending how you mount the LCD.

DogP

[ajf]

Here is my first draft of converting a K40 to Smoothie on an Azteeg X5:

http://opensourcelaser.blogspot.com/2014/12/cheap-chinese-laser-engravercutter.html

[Brandon K.]

http://bluewraith.blogspot.com/
Yet another K40 clone, upgrading with Arduino and RAMPS. :)

[Brandon K.]

Here is another K40 buildlog that I found from a Facebook group. DSP + all the standard upgrades.

[Jason Barnett]

Brandon,

 Any idea where you found this. Looks like he lives within a few miles of me and I'd like to get in contact with him.

Jason

[Brandon K.]

"Laser Engraving and Cutting" is the Facebook group name. I'm mobile or I'd get a direct link.

It's a closed group to try and prevent spammers. Lots of helpful people there too, and surprisingly no drama for a Facebook page.

[Jason Barnett]

Brandon,

 Thanks for the info. I actually had to set up a Facebook account just to get access to that group. Now, I am just waiting to be approved. 

[Brandon K.]

They do a pretty good job of weeding out spammers. If the new FB account gets denied let me know and I'll make sure someone lets you in.

New accounts and accounts with very few friends tend to be red flags for spam.

[Jason Barnett]

Brandon,

 Sorry to bother you again, but I think I requested to join the wrong group on Facebook. Could you give me a link when you get a chance, please. 

[Brandon K.]

No worries.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/441613082637047

[timne0]

I'll be building this Saturday @ London hackspace.  Converting to a RAMPS 1.4 system.

http://www.waark.com (nothing there really yet...)

[timne0]

Some K40 chinese laser conversion pictures here.  https://goo.gl/photos/ka3zDhUgRiju9c259

Hopefully these'll help someone (we were scouring for pictures from all sorts of sources to gain ideas when things weren't clear)  Feel free to pinch for use on any resource guides if any are worth it.

[Ryan]

Hi All,

Timne0 - Were you successful with your upgrade? I've gone through the same steps and appear to have the same power supply but am having trouble with my stepper motors. When using manual control and sending the G28 Home command in Repetier the motors will make noise but no movement. And if I send gcode for movement it moves but sounds horrible. Could you send me a wiring diagram for what worked for you? 

[timne0]

Let me copy paste from my hackspace report :)  tl:dr; stepper speed is set too high? That was our problem.

HS Report:

Couldn't get Imgur apps to upload photos from the build on Saturday, so i've added them to google photos.

https://goo.gl/photos/ka3zDhUgRiju9c259 should hopefully work!

Ben/Gary/Steve and I appeared about 10:30am on the Saturday.  Took us about half an hour to get setup and the first job was to have a good hard look at it.  No-one had read the build logs I'd encouraged them to read before we started, so it took a while to get us all in the right mindset.

The biggest problem (and what took a lot of time) was modifying the ribbon cable.  We took the bed of the laser out which gave me an opportunity to get all the metal swarf out.  By having a good look, we could see the optical end stops and how the mechanics all worked.  It would have been best if we'd got an adapter for the ribbon cable, but instead we crimped on ends to it and used some coloured pin wires to connect everything up.

Having done this, the next 4-6 hours were spent swearing at stepper motors that didn't want to step.  During this time I did what I do best which was help put up the projector screen in the class room, fetch bacon sandwiches, cleaned the toilets and do some non-essential poor quality soldering.  When I returned I read through some blogs and found some others having the same problem and it appeared to be the speed of the steppers.  with that fixed it was just a case of working out why now the steppers when instructed to move 1mm moved 1cm.  This was eventually rooted down to some older random manual modifications we made to the EPROM with tgreer which seems to be prioritised over the firmware on the arduino (? I was too tired to question this so may be wrong).

We reassembled the bed system and attempted to get the lasers aligned but found the base of the laser was too badly misaligned, so we ended up taking it out again and realigning it.  We got it down to a fair bit of accuracy, but needs further work.  The laser would fire, but at this point it was 2am and patience was running a little thin.  Our only windows laptop had suddenly fizzed earlier in the day and we were trying to run inkscape and the plugin on a windows surface and couldn't get the g-code to compile for a simple square.

The plus is that this is all now software issues, the RAMPS controller seems to be doing its job.  We do definitely need a new laser bed, the current one shares heritage with a banana.  Thinking of getting the Z-kit in from lightobjects.

Still need to add safety features and a new panel.  Getting close though, probably another long day of mods left to do on it, so may be back.

Thanks for all the help, suggestions and laughs on the Sat, good fun and I consumed a fair bit of the pinkish drink in the fridge. A few people saw me pouring out money from the sweet box - I was breaking a few notes not pinching stuff, though the sweet box is in need of some wood glue by the looks of it.

[ajf]

Hi All,

Could we try and keep this thread just for buildlog links and not broader discussion.  Please feel free to create new topics for troubleshooting.

regards,

aj

[TealVince]

I finished connecting my K40 to an AZSMZ Mini with a custom adapter board that allows switching back to the Moshiboard.

I posted up a more complete buildlog and source files at http://makermonkey.blogspot.com/2016/04/hacking-k40-laser-cutter-buildlog.html