I have an issue with the rotary on my Commarker Omni 1. This is a brand new unit I received 2 weeks ago. Machine setup was a breeze; I was up and running in 20 minutes, happily engraving stuff. I am not new to Lightburn software or galvo lasers.**
When I plugged in the rotary cable in the back of the machine, the stepper motor coils got energized instantly, and it’s very hard to turn the rotary chuck. Also, after the rotary setup in Lightburn, when I press the test button, nothing happened except the software freezing up for a few seconds. I get the green light for the rotary in Lightburn, so it looks like communication with the controller is established.
**What could cause this? Bad wiring? Bad stepper motor controller? I’ve never seen this before on a laser machine. I’m waiting for Commarker support now to see what they say…keeping my fingers crossed. Thank you for reading my post. Any help is appreciated.
I believe you should connect the rotary wit the laser Power OFF.
Do a power cycle (power and USB) wait 30 seconds before turning on again.
Read the Galvo rotary document:
I’ll wait for Commarker support to see what they say and if they allow me to open the box to inspect the driver they used without voiding the warranty. My suspicion is that the microstep driver (likely DM542?) is defective, and they may not have adequately checked rotary movement after final assembly
Thank you."I have sent a second email to Commarker support regarding this issue I encountered.
It is frustrating that basic quality checks, such as verifying rotary movement after assembly, seem to be overlooked. This simple step would prevent issues like the one I’m experiencing.
When I power up my fiber, the rotary is energized and won’t move. I’m not going to force it as it’s locked, so to speak.
What value do you have for steps/rotation? Is this value from Commaker?
… sorry, you got me laughing and rolling around in my chair …
I don’t think they set up anything other than the lens. I had to ask Cloudray what steps/rotation to use as the machine had a warranty sticker across the case haves. I couldn’t look at the motor stepper driver.
I have 12800 steps/rotation on mine.
The best test is to use the test button Lightburn supplies in the rotary gui.
All three of my galvo rotaries are 12800 steps per rotation. (My CO2 rotary is not.) I didn’t bother trying to get that out of someone. I just found it empirically.
I just set a circumference in the rotary setup and drew a box that size, then tried different steps per rotation until I got one full rotation. The final value is going to be a nice round number, and if you’re way off (I was off by an order of magnitude on my first guess), it doesn’t hurt anything – it just rotates the wrong amount.
Hi. I received an email from ComMarker support a few days ago. They said they would send me a new microstepper driver tomorrow. It’s possible the current driver works, but has incorrect settings. I will post pictures of the DIP switch settings when I replace the driver, in case that helps others.
This is really based on the motor driver. My co2 is different, although I interchange the rotary if I want between machines.
My Fiber motor driver is set to 12800, but my PiBurn is set to 32000 as it’s a belt driven rotary with a 2.5:1 ratio. I use the motor driver value, then multiply it by the gear ratio.
It’s a digital system up until the motor drives something that makes it analog. If digital didn’t work our computers would be useless.
To get to the full description of what’s going on, steps per rotation is a function of the the motor driver’s settings (e.g. microstepping) and the stepper motor’s internal design (step angle, most often 1.8° per full step, or 200 full steps per rotation). (And any gearing or belt reductions, I should also note, heh.)
Moving a stepper motor between drivers obviously isn’t going to change the step angle of the motor, but it can certainly result in a different number of steps per rotation due to the motor driver’s configuration.
Incidentally, the largest diameter things I’m doing on my fiber are about 76mm in diameter, call it 240mm in circumference, so 12.8k steps per rotation gives me a natural line interval of 0.01875mm, which is certainly cromulent for what I’m doing. Do you find yourself further into the larger-diameters/smaller-line-intervals corner of the graph, making 32k steps per rotation worthy? I’d be interested in learning what applications have informed your rotary choices.
I did a bunch of mugs with handles. Had a low cost roller type rotary and figured out a lot of it’s issues, such as handles and sizes.
The PiBurn is a nice, but expensive rotary. I have a machine file for it on my Ruida, many of the settings are slowed down to allow the device to change direction without disturbing the mug.
When I got the fiber, it came with an M80 chuck rotary. On some stuff, I’ve moved it to the co2 to allow it’s use there.
It probably slows down the machine to some extent. Since this is a roller and doesn’t depend on diameter, like a chuck, there are no computations that I’ve done, resolution wise. Seems fine enough on the fiber to work ok with higher resolution art.
I use the chuck most of the time, there are uses for the roller, but lately the chuck has been handling it fine.
… sorry, you got me laughing and rolling around in my chair …