3D Engraving With Air Assist Shapeoko 2

[Picengravertoo]

Here is a 3D engraving using an Air Assist designed by us with a 6W 450mn Laser Diode. It's made out of Delrin and is screwed onto the lens thread and seals against the laser module. There is a hose barb in the side for the air to enter and both the laser beam and air exits out of the tip through a 10-32 SS set screw with a .04" orifice.

I Gaussian blurred the image to smooth out the toolpaths, but I blurred it a little too much and lost some of the detail.
The gcode was generated with PicEngrave Pro 5 with a variable feedrate on each of the 737,935 lines of X,Y,Z & F gcode and was streamed with PicSender using grbl 9J.

The Flexmod P3 laser driver's modulation is controlled with a US Digital 10bit MA3 analog magnetic shaft encoder driven by a nema 17 stepper. This setup allows me to switch from the Z axis stepper to adjust the laser's focal height from the material, then switch to the encoder's stepper to control the laser's intensity with Z axis depth commands.

bear.jpg (458.94 KiB) Viewed 86865 times

[Picengravertoo]

This one I made the background white in the image and used Skip White in PicEngrave for optimizing the toolpath so it limited the travel area and cut down on the engraving time.

Shapeoko1.jpg (485.48 KiB) Viewed 86854 times

[Picengravertoo]

Another 6W laser diode 3D engraving example done in Poplar. Two separate gcode files were generate with PicEngrave Pro 5 from the same depth map image. One with X,Y & Z commands and another with X,Y,S & F commands. The two gcodes files were then combined together to create a new file with X,Y,Z,S & F commands on every line using our PicLaser 3D. The purpose of this was so the laser's focal point would follow down into the darker, deeper cutting areas by having the Z axis moves in the file.

We developed PicLaser 3D for carving a 3D spindle relief and then Laser engraving shades on it afterwards. When the gcode is combined in this manner, the laser's focal point with follow the 3D spindle reliefs profile to maintain the focal point on the surface.

This is the first time trying it by just using a laser diode for both of the 3D engraving processes done in one pass. More experimenting with the settings is surly needed.

This was a small gcode file with only 715,035 lines of code and of course, we used PicSender to stream it to the J-Tech PWM grbl. It was 5"W X 7"H in size and it took 5:00:19 in time to engrave.

3Ds.jpg (450.72 KiB) Viewed 86574 times

[Picengraver]

Ah So!