Moin
is it possible with lightburn to give commands for the z-axis along the length in order to engrave a wine barrel over the curve?
(totems s retrofitted with z-axis, MKS DLC32)
greets from Kiel/germany
Is this a one time piece or are you looking to produce many?
As far as I know it’s Z steps per pass. If you designed your own heavy duty roller system beneath the barrel you wouldn’t need to use z steps at all
Most barrels do not have perpendicular walls, they generally ‘bulge.’ So you would have to vary the Z axes while the X was moving to keep the distance the same.
Run into this a lot with glasses in a rotary, just a scale difference…
Just a thought…
@danielinkiel welcome aboard from Arizona… 
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Yeah I get that, but with the limited space the bulge wouldn’t have as much variance as say a brandy snifter. There would have to be individual layers for X amount of space.
It might be pretty large if you reduced it to the size of a brandy snifter. Whatever it is different and requires a longer lens or something to make up the difference. I have to make calls all time time with wine glasses…
Maybe someone here knows the function of the curve of a whiskey snifter and that of the common wine glass…
If going to do many barrels one approach might be to modify the laser for controllable Z axis, create an Arduino taking the GCode input, looks at the X and Y axis and generates a corrected Z and sends that to another Arduino running GRBL which only has Z driver connected to your laser Z.
Your PC software would send the GCode to both the laser and the Arduino barrel curve modifier. Generate the Gcode in Lightburn and save it.
Or build something which adjusts the machine height based on the X, Y gcode. Like making the machine 4 corner support like a Z table. This option don’t require the laser head to be adjustable.
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Any approach requires you to know the relative distances between the head and the material.
What kind of manufacturing tolerance as to ‘curvature’ is there to work with? How long and how much of a curve are you dealing with?
What would be the more simple approach is to ‘map’ the surface like when making PCBs or at least something similar.
You description is very complex and still requires you know or can measure the distances. If you want to do this dynamically you need to measure from the head or relative to it, adding mass and complexity to the head assembly. Just ‘debugging’ it would be a nightmare.
If you are using a ‘scan’ operation, which is probably the case, will the height of the barrel interfere with the scanning operation? In other words if you are scanning the width (generally going from top to bottom on the X axis) of the barrel and you raise the Z axes, it will have to be lowered as it goes the other way. The head may be too low to clear the upper curve of the barrel.
So some part of the solution will have to take into account how the barrel is physically in the machine and what type of operations you are using on it. Lens length should be taken into account.
I’ve done lots of objects and have yet to be able to get a good vector engraving, even at very minimum speeds and acceleration values. I have a PiBurn for a rotary.
It difficult to maintain good ‘traction’ with the material.
Good luck…
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