Benbox Laser Machines/CO2 Lasers/3D Printers

Hi Zax,

Can you tell me where I can find more info how to work with custom header and footer code?
Did you mention it in the manual? I cannot find any hints.

Greetings Maarten

I have just updated my T2Laser to v1.6b and was hoping to find any info what has changed/corrected/extended with this update.
The topics I found about updates in this forum are quiet old (sep 2020) with nothing mentioning v1.6b

Best regards,

Maarten

10 - Show name in current profile.
After a profile is selected, show its name in the title bar. This way you can always see what settings are currently in use.

8 - save text file after finishing the job. File name = {drawing name} {finish date/time} .log
The log file contains info about the job done.
Date = date/time of start and finish
Name = name of drawing
Settings = speed/power/pause/air support yes.no / repeat /

Two reasons i like to have this option:
A) i have a history what was made when with what parameters
B)  This way you have a simple message system without forcing me to keep staying in the room and watching the screen of my laptop al the time. My jobs can run quiet long and i don’t want to be in the smelly room all time.

The location of the log file can be local or on a network location. I can monitor this location with my phone/tablet to see when the job is done.

Or you should add a messager feature to your program. (But thats is way more complex) 😁

Hi Zax,

The right click did the trick. I didn't knew this option. Thanks.

I build the box, fans, tray and cover myself.

Designed in Inventor:


Built the box in the garden during a week:


And all to build a model of an engine shed:


Made the walls and beams of the roof from 3mm MDF:



The beams in the walls are imitated by cut cardboard sheets and glued on the MDF walls, here a trial with cheap paper first:


Sorry to keep asking questions, but the following dxf file shows differently in the previewer. It is a part of a model of an engine shed. In this case the wooden floor. The DXF file shows fine, including all the planks. It opens without any errors in T2Laser. But after reading it in T2 and sending it to the laser, the preview shows some planks with diagonals instead of parallel lines representing the planks.

Can you replay this on your side as well? And if so, what can be the reason?

Best regards,
Maarten

Thanks for the comment Zax.

I am still defining a route from 3D modelling to the laser cutter.

At this moment the route is as follows:

1 Create 3D model in Autodesk Inventor.
2 Create drawing of model in Inventor
3 If needed, add extra engraving lines in the drawing manually.
4 Save the Inventor drawing as DXF R12 file.
5 Use QCAD to explode all objects (hatches, text) to polylines
6 Save the QCAD drawing as DXF R12 file.
7 Import the  DXF in T2Laser
8 Create NC

Although it looks a long way, this isn't really the case.  25% of the steps are done automatically with some home made code. The inventor drawing contains hatches which will be translated as separate lines. (step 5) This way I can create custom hatch patterns which follows the borders of surfaces automatically when I change the size of these surfaces in 3D. Same goes for text blocks.

The things I am struggling most with are the settings in T2Laser. This has to do with my lack of experience of the software.

Last night I was halted by another setting behavior. (I think)  I have a DXF file (Thanks for the sugestions Zax, I dropped the PDF route here) which contain colors at line level, not on layers!
After the DXF file (step 7)  the colors are shown correctly. (Huray!) But when I create a nc file, I see all power values are set to 255. And I wanted to control the power of the laser by these colors.

DXF options set:

on - Engrave and Cut
on - Absolute DXf colors , 0  (I have read the line in the  manual several time but don't understand what this value does?)
on - Force Splines
on - Reverse DXF segments
on - Skip minimum power
on - Combine path

The preview only shows one color, blue.  Shouldn't this be all the colors which are also visible when open the dxf file?

The NC doesn't have any speed corrections, all are 255. Why?

I did a reset of all settings, loaded the default settings of grbl and reconnected to the nano again. Did a test run with a drawing and wend fine.
Then I had a close look at my drawing files. I start by creating the 3d sheet metal model in Inventor 2020. I define a drawing for it and export the drawing to dxf. This dxf is readable in T2Laser without any issues. (Good!)
But when i want to control the contents of the dxf better, like converting to polylines and text to lines, this cannot be done inside Inventor. I have to open the created inventor dxf in Autocad and do the desired actions there. When finished I save the file as dxf again. Since January this year Autodesk confirmed there is an issue with saving files as dxf with Autocad. They are working on a solution for this.

btw these where my changed  grbl parameters I did use before I did the reset:
$11=0.010 Junction deviation, mm (0.020)
$12=0.002 Arc tolerance, mm (0.020)
$20=1 Soft limits, boolean (0)
$22=1 Homing cycle, boolean (0)
$23=3 Homing dir invert, mask (0)
$24=50.000 Homing feed, mm/min (100.000)
$110=4000.000 X Max rate, mm/min (5000.000)
$111=4000.000 Y Max rate, mm/min (5000.000)
$130=360.000 X Max travel, mm (400)
$131=235.000 Y Max travel, mm (300)
$132=40.000 Z Max travel, mm (200)

Any strange values which shouldn't be in there?

Thanks for the offer. I saved the default values with mine by saving them to text files and compare them.
Corrections where made quickly. I corrected the max size of by machine and a few other things I forgot already.