So…not sure if this is a software or a rotary issue. (I’ll be posting similar question in the K40 forums..)
FINALLY got my big K40 up and running, on Sunday. Plenty of successful tests on acrylic, stone, metal. Today I decided to tackle bottle etching.
LB sees the roller, communicates. I did the requisite setup in the file (diameter, enable, etc). Here’s the key thing I don’t understand…where do I place the art on the work board, and what orientation for the laser do I use? Upper left (home)? Center? What’s ‘home’ for a rotary setup?
How does one go about orienting a bottle on this thing?
My first test - the ‘well, let’s make a mistake’ test - had the thing behaving oddly: It went to the neck, tried to burn a hole in it, then went to the left of the neck, sat for a minute, then the right of the neck, and sat there. Did nothing else.
I would much rather me be doing something wrong, than have something be faulty.
Not my kind of machine, but the rollers should be parallel to the Xaxis. You want the sweeping motion to be along the Xaxis and the rotarry making small steps in the Yaxis.
There is no “Home” on a rotary because there are no limit switches. You must disable any Home feature and use the Start From: Current Position.
SO…
1st test: Image backwards, AND wrong orientation…forgot to set image to vertical, and HUGE.
2nd test: Flipped/rotated image, still came out backwards. And huge.
3rd test: Says rotary diameter is 65-ish mm; caliper sez 24.5. Entered those values, ran test… got an incredibly squashed image. And small.
That is exactly what I say when I don’t understand and try to guess at the settings. Trust me, I have been there more than once, especially with both the chuck and roller rotaries.
The process setup in Lightburn works because too many people are using it. There are several postings on this, including mine, that give a step by step description. Which I have to go back and read every time I use the rotary.
Once you get it figured out, you will be asking, why was this so g%#$&*#!d hard?
You’re gonna be waiting a while.
So, I took a break from it, yesterday, and when I came back I took out the rotary, and went back to working on some good ol’ flat acrylic projects.
It seems the rotary somehow jacked something up and my Y axis is almost non-functional. I won’t go into the lengthy detail of everything I tried, but the bottom line is this: When I zero the gantry (upper left) - which I have to do by hand, at the moment (loosening the belts and moving it gently, retightening the belts) - and reset XY zeros in the menu, the X axis works just fine, but the Y axis moves maybe half an inch and the coordinates read it went from 0.0 to 299.7.
This is regardless of having the computer connected or not.
I’d swap the motor drivers for testing, but can’t get the wiring from Y over to X… I could only do X to Y, see if the problem follows. That said I’m not really sure it’s the drivers because if I try to do a test burn, it takes the file and acts as if the size of everything is about 98% smaller than it actually is. So it essentially feels like the Ruida thinks it’s working with a full size table (at Y), but scaled down to an almost a miniscule level.
When I first fire up, and after it resets, X moves to 197.0 (middle). All my projects in Lightburn are set to start upper left.
It’s been working fine since Sunday, until I used the damned roller.
I’ve tried resetting X and Y in the menu several times.
Sounds like you didn’t disable the rotary in Lightburn and those Y axis settings are stored in your controller. Reconnect to Lightburn and ensure that the rotary is disconnected / disabled. The machine should home properly then. If it doesn’t, something got messed up in your settings.
Is this actually a Ruida like you have in your profile, or is it GRBL like most K40’s? Further advice requires the correct information.
“Sounds like you didn’t disable the rotary in Lightburn and those Y axis settings are stored in your controller.”
I did. The weird, condensed cutting behavior started on my last bottle test. So, when I came back out and set everything up again, I opened a new project and disabled the rotary. Still had the issue.
If it is, click Vendor Settings and Yes to continue. Verify that the X and Y axis step length are t least close to each other. If the Y axis is way off, change it to match the X axis. You will need to do a calibration after making this change.
I don’t know what the correct settings for your machine are. I’m sure they are different than mine.
Now, there was a difference in rotary enable settings, between the handy little icon up right, and the machine settings menu; the icon setting said it was off but machine said otherwise.
Apparently, the rotor enable setting in Machine Settings, did the trick. Why the interface icon can’t communicate that to Machine settings, I don’t know.
Question, though…should ‘invert keypad direction’ and ‘direction polarity’ settings be the same for both axis’?
I think… if you shut the machine off with it still enabled, then disable it in Lightburn, when you turn the machine back on it doesn’t update Lightburn. You probably could have enabled it, then disabled it and that would have solved as well. Maybe.
Either way, now you know, when it act
s like this check rotary enable.
That’s good, but moving it manually is a bad habit to get into.
