I recently purchased a 100w Chinese laser off eBay. It's one of the red and black models made by Shangdong Kehui Laser Equipment Co. LTD. I also purchased a 3 jaw chuck type rotary axis. For the most part it's working quite well but I'm having a problem with the speed of the rotary axis. I'll try to explain what's going on and hopefully somebody out there knows how to fix the issue.
I tried multiple versions of RDworks but for some reason the laser wasn't recognizing the file format on some versions. I finally settled on version 8.01.19 which seems to be working fine.
After I hooked up the rotary axis I checked the web and found multiple places where they said to go into the vendor settings and modify the Y-axis settings. So I backed up the factory settings and then calibrated the Y-axis for the size of the glass jar I was using for my test engraving. This actually worked quite well and I was pretty pleased with the results. The problem with this method is that you have to go into vendor settings and re-calibrate the Y-axis every time the size of your object changes.
So then I decided I would try the, "Enable rotate engrave" option under the Output tab in RDworks. There were multiple sites on the web that said you had to go into user settings and turn on the rotary axis but even after trying multiple different versions of RDworks and trying different values on the Model(M) menu item there is apparently no option for this in the user settings on my laser. This apparently is not a big issue because after checking the, "Enable rotate engrave" option on the Output tab the rotary axis seems to be mostly working. I checked the stepper controller for the Y-axis and it was set on 5,000 step option. The rotary axis has a 3:1 ratio on the belt drive so I came up with a value of 15,000 for the Circle pulse. So far so good.
I then set up a test case where I set the Diameter value for the rotate engrave at 90, did some math (pi * 90) and came up with a circumference of 282.74mm. I drew a vertical line exactly 282.74mm long, set the feed rate to 5mm/s and ran the program (leaving the laser head away from the rotating axis). The good news is that it appears to rotate exactly 1 revolution when cutting the line. The bad news is that it only takes about 12 seconds to do this. According to my calculations, 282mm at 5mm/sec should take more like 56 seconds. Then, after the cut is finished, the Y-axis returns to the origin point VERY quickly (less than a second). At that speed I'm worried that whatever I'm engraving will fly off or break.
Anyway, long explanation but....... Anybody know how to adjust the speed? I see a, "Speed factor" under Cut parameters under the User tab. Would adjusting this value to something like 21% slow things down? If so, what about the crazy fast return to origin speed?
Thanks in advance to anybody who can help me with this.