On April 12 we had a scheduled workshop session in the laser room with the goal of setting up and calibrating the two rotary adapters for use with the laser in its “new” configuration, and creating a set of simple procedures for laser users to follow in order to use one of the rotary adapters. I was joined by Kip, Guy, Renee, and Sriram, who were all very helpful in trying to figure things out.
A rotary adapter replaces the Y-axis motion of the gantry with rotary motion of the work piece, enabling the laser to work on a cylindrical or conical object. This has always meant unplugging the gantry and plugging in the rotary adapter in the same place. That’s what the original laser controller expected, and it worked fine. Enabling the rotary adapter with the old software just meant a different setting for calibrating the Y axis.
As best we could figure out at the workshop, this doesn’t work as expected with the new controller. If we enable the rotary adapter, the job can’t be started by pressing the Start button, as is our standard procedure. If we instead used the Send button and then started the job from the laser’s control panel, the job would try to run, but there would be no motion on the rotary axis. This despite the fact that jogging the position manually in the Y axis did correctly cause the rotary adapter to spin. We only figured out that much by reading forum posts online.
We were able to get a rotary job to run with both axes, but only by turning off the switch in Lightburn that enables the rotary adapter. So, as far as Lightburn and the Ruida controller were concerned, it was just running a normal flat job on the bed. Of course, the Y axis calibration was used instead of any rotary axis calibration. If we wanted to use this as the standard procedure for rotary jobs, we’d have to ask the user to change the calibration setting, and then remember to change it back after the rotary job is completed. This seems inconvenient and error-prone, and risks exposing a beginner laser user to extra complexity needed only by users of the rotary adapter. This would probably be unacceptable, especially given that we’ve gotten by this long without the rotary adapters being commonly used.
Our best guess is that we need to connect the rotary adapter to the Ruida controller’s “U” axis, which is currently unconnected. In order to do that, we’ll need to install a fourth stepper motor controller (in addition to the existing X, Y, and Z axis controllers). I have that stepper motor controller on order.
It’s also possible that there are controller settings and/or Lightburn software settings that need to be adjusted in order to make it work with the old method (unplugging the gantry and plugging the rotary adapter into the Y axis controller). If so, I’d think we would have learned about those settings from the forum threads we read, but we did not.
The five of us will get together for a followup workshop once the new controller has arrived.