As many of you know I have several HF blowers and I routinely brag about their longevity- So yesterday my newest one, less than 3 years old, tripped the breaker. Now something different I've noticed about my older green blowers and the newer gray blowers, aside from the color, is the spool-up time of the motor itself. The older ones hit full speed in about 1 second, while the newer ones take nearly 5 seconds to top out. Electric motors, while I understand the basics, I'm not clear on the differences between CD motors, brush, brushless, etc... Anyone care to give me a brief lesson?
That said- after tripping the breaker I pulled the motor out of the box to inspect. When I flipped the switch, sounded exactly the same as always, the distinct hum of the motor and housing, only instead of the impeller turning, it was just wobbling back and forth as if it couldn't decide which way to go. I turned it off, and gave the impeller a spin and flipped the switch- the motor kept it moving about the same speed, but wouldn't go faster. I'm assuming the motor lost half of it's ability to move the armature, just not sure of the why... Anyway, I notice that HF still shows an actual green blower online so I ordered one. I have a second gray version also, and one thing both of them do the green ones never did, is produce this weird harmonic whine, which I believe is caused by a slight imbalance. I've had 3 green ones, none of them ever did that. So I'm hoping the green one I'm getting is the same as my previous ones...
Now onto the software-- Last night, while trying to make my life a little easier, as per suggestions I decided to switch my EzCad over to work in inches rather than millimeters. Well- what should've been a piece of cake turned into a 3 hour ordeal of troubleshooting and complete beam realignment procedures. First I switched over to INCHES, easy enough. The screen switched over, good... I draw a 2" or so square, and redlighted it, got a 2mm square instead. Ok, so get into the parameters, the field size is still 160mm, not in inches, and the ratio factors below were totally out of whack... so right there I shut the program down and re-loaded it. The 'wrench' parameters seemed to clear up, everything was in inches. But the F3 parameters, all worse than before. Max engrave speed was like 96,000, home offset position was into 5 digits... Seemed like the program translated inches back to mm rather than the other way around. I restarted the program again, no help. Redlighting anything, the beam was locked at the lower left.
SO, I switched back to MM, restarted, and all the parameters were back to realistic values. But totally different. Had an engraving job waiting, and I have the program in factory default form in another folder so I started that program and got parameter numbers from that, then copied them into my working version. Did a quick redlight test, drew a 1" box, engraved it on a piece of scrap, redlighted it, it lined up close enough, and it measured close enough.
OK, let's get this job done (watch clasps)... I entered the text, aligned, hit start, and-- no engraving...? Oh, 30% power, raised it to 40%-- kept doing that till I finally realized it simply isn't firing the laser. Upon more testing I figured out that no matter what speed I set for the engraving, the actual running speed was the 3000 speed the redlight is set to. So I went back into test mode and called up some prior jobs. I found that it would engrave square outlines, and a few other odd things. Ok, what did I do to my laser?? So I shut it down, and ran the program in the other folder. Worked perfectly...? So back to testing- out of frustration I hit 'text' which put 'text' on screen, I set it for 200 speed, 100 power, 20 freq... I ran it, and it fired 2 angled lines near the top corners? I set the redlight to trace the contour, and what I found was, the laser fired between where it shuts down at one point and moves to the next point to start again- in other words, it was firing when it was supposed to NOT fire, and not firing when it was supposed to fire...
I checked virtually every parameter setting between this and the secondary program, the null, high-low, port settings, values, and everything matched.
So I spent the next hour realigning and resizing the beams to coincide with my spare program. And all is well again. Obviously some parameter got corrupted during my attempt to change over inches. I have no clue which one, or why...
Anyone?
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