Possible to manually use laser on a dry run ?

beefy wrote:

UPDATE:
Working good now Snowgoer.

You may call me Greg

Thanks again.
Can now turn the laser on/off from my pendant, woohoo

Glad to hear it; good work!

Just to be clear (for me and anyone who finds this in the future) for your workflow it seems that you don't use the laser touch off routine at all? It looks to me like you're aligning the laser dot on your material, zeroing on X and Y, and then doing your dry run. After which, you press the button to call your subroutine, which moves the torch to where the laser was, and then zero's X and Y?

Clever; that seems like a good approach! Thanks for sharing.

I think my only comment would be that it prevents using the laser button to align to a crooked sheet. For my work flow, I generally make the sheet square to the table (which is square to the gantry), because I rarely cut anything that's heavy, and my table isn't big enough for full sheets. So for me it's rare that I use the edge alignment feature of the laser button, and the subroutine would work nicely.

I may take a look at doing a dry run with laser offset applied in the future, especially because I would like to better understand the plasmac component, but for now this seems to be a nice workflow.

beefy wrote:

I wouldn't say I don't use the laser touch off routine at all, I just haven't played with that yet.
I'm also a bit lost of the "edge alignment feature of the laser button", must be something I've missed in the manual.

Take a peek at "To set the origin with rotation" in this section: linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/plasma/qtplasmac.html#plasma:laser

The subroutine doesn't necessarily zero the XY co-ords after the the peripheral offset correct move, it just puts them back to whatever they were before the move, so the torch ends up where the laser was but with the same co-ords.
So at the end of the dry run move the XY position could be anywhere for instance, and I could run the sub then.

Could be useful if I have a situation where I know a location on a partially cut sheet is X489.3 Y278.6 (a pierce point for example). So I jog the crosshairs to that location, set the work co-ords to those values, and do the dry run, then run the sub after.

Hope that made sense.

I think so, I will try to find time to play with this at the machine in the next few days.

beefy wrote:

Greg,

I'm actually really happy you mentioned that one. I've seen that one in the manual but was left thinking what does it mean with rotation.

Thanks for this feedback, I added a line in the docs to clear this up. Sometimes it's hard to write docs assuming someone knows nothing about the features when you're already familiar with them... You are right; it was ambiguous.

So if I've got this right it seems very similar to Sheetcam's "align" feature, which is used if the sheet is laid diagonally on the table.
However, with Sheetcam you have to check 2 points on the sheet on the table then go back to Sheetcam to enter those points so it can rotate the drawing.

I didnt know sheetcam could do this, but it does sound like a bit of a PITA. Good to know anyways.

Looks like Qtplasmac can do the same thing right at the table. I just keep getting Xmas presents, so a big thanks for bringing that to my attention.
Once I physically install my lasers that is the next thing I'll try out.

Keith

Enjoy! I didnt get to the table tonight to play with your subroutine. Maybe tomorrow...[/quote]