I am so sorry, I totally forgot about mentioning their name;
Quantum Machinery Technology
(Liaocheng City Quantum Machinery Technology Co., Ltd.)
So far the supplier has been very helpfull and very, very patient with me haha.
Peter ty lets all go have a looksee what it is they do with their Z axis… cheers.
Came up with another hacky way to do this for cheap; a camera (heck, even a microphone) in the loop, a companion app. and using sublayers as out of band signalling method to control a motorized Z. Fun weekend project ahead!
Ok the mad hatter is at work lol… pictures and images of pitchers full of blood otherwise it didnt happen. Good luck.
I can’t even begin to understand how that would work haha, but it sounds great!
Ok I have spoken to the company a person by the name Joy, regarding this zaxis, I suspect its not what we were hoping for it may still prove to be but but but I may as well have spoken to a wall.
What was given to me is the following a link to a video where you hear the auto z going from the bottom engraving to the middle making a mark then moving up some more and making another mark.
How this is set up is a mystery, I have asked in several different ways for further information how this works in Lightburn with nothing forth coming.
The people there are lazy not willing to understand and being deliberatly stupid.
I know the translators work, I know they arent perfect but every question I asked was ignored.
Here is the video you can see it has auto z control and I have to treat that as the biblical 10 commandments.
Has anyone else tried to approach them for information?
Oh the pdf regarding the laser they are selling I thought maybe I could post that here but the pdf doesnt even mention Z control and very little of anything else.
Same type of nonesense English we are all used to seeing already.
I for the moment give up.
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There’s no video?
Yeah, does all sound a bit scammy. Strapping a stepper motor to a z-axis is hardly an invention! What would be magical is getting it to work with a galvo in lightburn.
Regarding my hacky out of band control thing, my bench PSU let out the magic blue smoke, so waiting for a part to arrive. The detection thing was working OK, but can’t continue developing further until the part arrives.
I apologise it was the way I wrote it, they said to me here is the video, there is nothing to see in the video you dont see the stepper, how its hooked up to the machine, you see jack shizenhouzen, its a blind faith purchase!
It just makes me so angry how much contempt some sellers have towards buyers who spend real money on their product.
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I’d guess it’s just a normal laser with one of these:
Yeah I think there’s 4 types here:
- basic, unpowered crank handle
- stepper controlled. May have a ToF sensor or something to try to measure distance
- It looks like Full Spectrum has an “AI camera” model that scans the work’s shape and can raise and lower the Z to focus on different levels. However, that won’t work that well for curves. The powered Z is going to be dead slow relative to the galvo mirror speed.
- There’s a true “dynamic focus” system that will adjust the focus as it goes. This one can do true curves. How does it know what the shape is beforehand? LIDAR scanner? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeqNc8XDdMw
I love the dynamic focus, but I don’t think LB supports it. Also it’s going to limit the raster scan speed when being used, that lens is not going to move blindingly fast like those galvo mirrors, but I do see you could easily just park it for flat work with no performance penalty. Probably not a significant slowdown for vectors.
I’m sure the dynamic focus is pretty expensive. I tried looking on AliExpress and if they exist there I haven’t found them- looks like “dynamic focus” is getting spammed with #2 type motorized Z, or a rotary axis being able to do “curves”, or just the fact that people carve 3D coins with them. Not the feature I’m looking for.
The 3D scanheads are cool. They don’t however work with LIDAR. As far as I was told and understand, you have to make a 3D version of the (curved) object and load it up in the software. That way the machine knows where to focus on the object. So I guess ‘dynamic’ is a bit of a misnomer.
I came across another video from ‘OV Laser’. They have a lot of video’s on YouTube. One of them shows how the Z is controlled by EZCad2.
I have contacted the supplier and he said the following:
“Regarding the electric Z-axis function, by inputting the workpiece height in the software, the software can control the machine to adjust the focal length. This function is mainly used by customers who have deep metal engraving or cutting, with a thickness or depth of 1-2 mm. Customers can set several engraving tasks in the software and the workpiece height or each engraving task is different so that the laser can reduce the focal length as the engraving and cutting deepen, so that the laser can always remaining in a relatively strong state.”
“EZCAD2 supports the electric Z-axis function, but Lightburn cannot operate the electric Z-axis function The price of this function is based on our ordinary 2D machine + USD100. It is recommended that customers request this function when purchasing the machine, otherwise the customer will need to add circuits inside the control box and install a new driver later. In addition, the column also needs to purchase a new electric axis column, and the manual column of the original machine cannot be used.”
Maybe it is of any help to you guys.
One of the rsons why ecad 3 allows the upload and slicing of .stl files.
I use the term “dynamic” in that it’s dynamically changing the focus at high speed while running the galvo. The video I linked shows a lens on a small linear rail being jogged back and forth. It’s placed before the lens and XY galvo mirrors.
There’s no way a linear rail block and lens being physically moved with that much displacement is going to be anywhere near as fast as rotating the lightweight galvo mirrors. So I expect this is limited to much slower rasters, but the time penalties with vectoring wouldn’t be so much.
Yeah I didn’t look too much into how the 3D model gets entered- but actually it doesn’t matter that much, that part is fluid. If they don’t do a LIDAR today, they might make them that way next month.
Seems like it would be easy enough to put a few cameras at an angle and just scan the red dot around and see where it appears on the cameras’ FOV. That would effectively be a scan, and pretty cheap. Like I say, if they don’t do it today, it’s still easy to see how that or any number of 3D scanning solutions could be applied. That’s the kind of thing an independent hacker could actually redesign in at any point.
The laser having a dynamic focus lens in the head is the difficult core technology. Actually, the other big thing would be getting LightBurn to drive that.
Hi,
Very interesting discussion about controlling z-axis.
I have made a DIY z-axis system based on Klipper, a 3d printer firmware highly customisable. It accept standard g-code and special commands for Klipper.
Klipper, Moonraker, a forked Klipperscreen and I used old smartphone as Raspberry PI touch screen, with xsdl-Xserver Android app(but any Pi screen works).
As is, the system is stand alone. I use a BLtouch for automatic focusing on any surface.
But if Lightburn could handle two connexion to a controller, one to galvo controller, and another to Klipper, the system is ready to receive move commands on Z axis(and for a X/Y gantry of course).
The project is open source, if interested I can explain more in dedicated subject.
Some other features
Temperature monitoring for room and laser source(ntc 100k for 3d printer hotend) with graphical histogram.
Output switching with touch screen (air assist, ring light, fume extractor, whatever you want) and gcode
User Memory.
Memory menu for defocusing
Video:
Best regards
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I had a good laugh one of absolute pleasure at the ingenuity of people!!
What a magnificent idea, using something that was not intended for this purpose and making it work, Brilliant!!
Leveraging an old android phone! Brilliant!!
Defocusing!! Brilliant..
You have tackled this from a users perspective which is just amazing in itself.
Is this on GitHub? I am so curious, I have a couple of BL touches laying around from old printers I have been wondering what to do with my raspberry PI as well..
Would love if anything to see more!
Cheers and TY for putting a smile on my face.
It simply delights me to see ingenuity and creativity in any form or shape.
Avagreatday
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Hi Steve,
Thanks for your reply 
Yes there is a GitHub, i’m still working on it, here’s the adress:
I start a new subject on how to use it.
Best regards
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absolutely awesome will have a look at that ty for the link
Sometimes I wish I didnt read so much, but just looking at the documentation of the laser pecker 5, a friend of mine got one to review.
That pithy misserable thing has a lower the galvo head by a range 0.01 to whatever as you engrave.
If laserpecker can do it, why cant we leverage the Rotary port to do the same thing?
Common tech people you know its not hard to do you know you can do it!!! There are enough people that want it!!!
I understood these to be gcode machines and are not detected as a galvo type machine. Not a normal JCZ type controller used in most fiber machines.
I believe, gcode has a Z adjust, else it wouldn’t work in a milling machine type of environment. LP5 control board is likely designed by them to be used by their software.
I know they are working on many of the parts of the lp5 that don’t work correctly, such as the rotary.
If it’s gcode, I doubt some items, like 3dslice are unavailable?
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