3018 PRO - Setting up your laser

ready to set up your diode laser then stick around because that's what we're doing today [Music] so first let me apologize i promised this video back in february march of this year and we've locked down and doing other videos i just never got around to making it so thank you to everyone who's been asking for it and have been patient enough to wait now on to today's video what we're going to do first is take a look at the lasers and understand a bit about the principles and how they work because we'll need to know that to move forward we'll then go over to the machine physically install and set it up in the 3018 pro we'll then use a piece of free software called laser grbl to start to do some calibration tests and find the focal point now once we've done that we'll then do a little bit of experimenting and start to play about with feed speeds and the power settings to understand more about it now as in some of my previous tutorials this is an abridged version of graham bland's introduction to lazy tutorial and as always i would suggest downloading it from the link below and having a read of it because he often goes into detail that we don't always cover in the video i would also say it's probably worth you doing the tuning your grbl video test that we've done previously and i'll put a link up in the corner because if you do that first it helps the lives test that we'll be doing a bit later now we are talking about lasers so i just have to do a bit of a safety prompt here please make sure that when you're using the laser you have a safety shield in place or at least some laser goggles that you can wear and it's not just your eyes remember it's anyone walking into the room and if you have pets little furry four-legged friends running about keep them out the room at the same time because it can damage their eyes as well now with all that out of the way let's move over and start to take a look at the laser so to get the most out of our laser we need to understand a bit about how it works and as you can see i've spared no expense on this demonstration for you now we start with the diode laser that will be fixed to the z-axis at the bottom of your layers you will have a lens if you imagine these copper wires to be the light coming out of the laser all your laser beam and at some point along that beam there will be a focal point the test that we'll be doing shortly is to find that focal point and that will give us a reference to measure back to the laser that we can use for all of our future jobs and the focal point is really important but just going back to the lens for a second these lasers will have two types of lenses either a fixed lens or a variable lens it doesn't matter which one you have you just need to know what you have because that will affect how you find the focal point if you have a fixed lens you'll be raising the z-axis up or taking it down until we know that focal point is touching the top of the material perfectly if you have a variable lens you'll be rotating that lens in or out away from the laser and that will adjust the focal point accordingly taking it further away or closer to the laser now personally i do think that a fixed laser is slightly easier to work with and i'll explain why with the variable lenses you often find there's a bit of play in the lens itself and that will affect it when it's cutting so if you have play in your lens i would suggest putting something like ptfe tape around the thread and then putting it back in just to minimize that amount of wobble the other thing is if you imagine you've done all of your testing and for any reason you accidentally knock that lens you've just moved the focal point so you're gonna have to go back to the start and do all your tests again now if you have a variable focus lens after the testing i would suggest maybe putting something on there to stop it rotating like a drop of glue and save any accidents happening now going back to the focal point itself the reason this is so important is if you imagine the energy of the laser that focal point now is where it's going to be most optimal for cutting or burning the wood the easiest way to explain this is probably if you have a sharp pencil and you drew a line you'd have a very thin crisp line if you had a blunt pencil and drew a line you would have a slightly wider softer edge line and that's basically the difference between whether you're cutting here or above or below it so there you will have a very crisp sharp line above or below you will have a wider softer line a ball ball below will still burn the wood but there is the point that we're aiming for to be doing our cutting and burning so let's move on to setting the laser up and then doing some tests so taking a look at the laser that we're using today don't be put off if your doesn't look the same there are lots of manufacturers of these lasers and they all make them to different specifications what is relevant is that the width of the laser itself fits into your 3018 pro mine is about 33 millimeters wide and i know that fits into my carriage the other important thing is knowing what connection the laser takes i have a chronos maker board which takes multiple laser connections and i know it will take most of the lasers designed for the 3018 pros do check your own connections if you have a different board now the laser itself is rated at a wavelength of 450 with a 15 watt output there is an argument as to whether these small diodializers can really output at 15 watts but that's not something we're going to discuss today on one end you have the lens and this is where the laser actually comes out and on the other end of this one we have a fan and then the control board now you may find on some lasers these are mounted separately they will be in a separate unit that can be fixed to the 3018 pro rather than being mounted on the laser itself again it doesn't mean that it's right or wrong it's just a different way of making the lasers now if we look at the control board a little bit closer you'll see that on one side we have the connection terminal this is a three pin connection consisting of live ground or neutral and the pwm for the power management on the other side we have an on and off switch now obviously do make sure you turn the laser on when using it it's often a big mistake that people can't figure out why the laser is not working and they simply haven't turned it on more importantly do remember to turn the lights off when you're not using it and it just minimizes any risk of having stride light off the layers are coming on for whatever reason that may be so now let's look at fitting the lyzer itself in the holder this should be four grooves milled out and this is to catch the corners of the laser itself make sure your bolt is slackened off and the easiest way to do this is to just place the laser into the front two grooves if it doesn't go in easily just pull this carriage out a little bit and it should then slide in you don't want to pull it too hard obviously because they can be fragile now with the laser in place you need to set the depth and this really is guess work at this stage if you have a variable focus the depth from the bottom of the lyzer to the wood on average is around 50 mil so that is a good place to start so the easiest way to do this obviously is use something like a ruler and pull the laser down so it's roughly about 50 mil and then lock it off with the allen bolt i happen to know that my laser being a fixed lens sits a lot lower as low as 20 mil off the material so i'm going to drop that down a bit further and then tighten that up now the next point here is to connect the power supply now this just should clip in nice and easily and then we'll look at connecting that to the control board so the first thing is make sure that the power is turned off to the board because you don't want to short anything out the next thing is locate where your laser ports are on the chronos maker i know they're all down this right hand side for me it's going to be this red three pin port here because that matches what my cable is but as mentioned previously they will vary between different lasers so if we plug that in the thing i'm going to do is remove the power for the spindle because we're not using the spindle i just always remove this for safety to save the board thinking that it may be running that so now you're your pc or laptop the first thing you'll want to do is head over to lazygrbl.com forward slash download and get the latest version of the software as always there will be a link in the description to the web page the speed and ease i've already downloaded and installed this software so let's open it now now laserjbl is a free piece of software that we can use and it can be customized to some degree you can import g-code and pictures into it so it's certainly a piece of software worth leaving on your pc after you've done the initial setup now before we go any further there are a couple of things that we do need to note if you've never connected your 3018 pro to your machine before you may need to do this option up here underneath tools which is installing the ch340 driver if you have already connected your 3018 pro then there's no need to do this option the other place we need to take a look at is down here in the jog controls now you'll see there are options to move the x and y axis but there is no option to move the z axis so we're going to turn that feature on now so if you go up to grbl come down to settings and in the jog control tab turn on the show zed up and down control we now have extra options to move the z axis the next thing we want to take a look at is this custom button function over on the bottom now as previously mentioned this is grimes tutorial and he created a series of buttons to go in here to make our life easier so to import these we right click in this space down here go import custom buttons and within the files that will be provided with the video you should see this zip file here which is a collection of custom buttons so we'll click open click yes yes go through all of them clicking yes and you'll now see we have an extra selection of buttons along the bottom now just to walk through these the eye symbol is to turn the laser on but at low power this will allow us to focus it or to be able to move the laser a bit when we're trying to find a start position to be the next is the laser on button and this will turn your control board on for laser mode this is basically your dollar 32 setting which is a boolean option you can either turn it on or off when it's off that's the spindle mode when it's on that's for laser mode and the last button we have is a two second low power on and this will help again when focusing but unlike the oi symbol this will only turn it on for two seconds in a short burst so with all the customizations done in the software what we can now do is power up the 3018 pro connect it to the machine and then connect the software to it so i've just turned the power on plug the usb in and over here i know that my com port is 11. the board setting is correct so now if we click connect you'll hear that little beep and that means this is all on so with everything connected you can now hear that the fan is running on the laser unfortunately there's no way for me to film this without the noise of that fan just because of how close everything is in proximity but taking a look back at liza grbl what we can now see is that because we're connected all these job controls have come to life so on the far left hand side you have the speed and this will control how fast it moves your x and y axis these buttons here will control your x and y axis obviously forward and back on the y axis left and right on the x-axis or diagonal options as well the home button in the middle is obviously to return it to its home point or its zero point and to set the zero point we use this globe icon over on these buttons the z controls that we loaded in earlier these are fixed parameters of fixed movements so you can go up or down by 0.1 mil 1 mil and 10 mil the slider on the far right this controls how far it will actually move so what we can do is move it left or right 10 mil hopefully yours should be doing exactly the same if you do that same test so at this point we also want to take a look at our grbl settings more specifically the dollar 30 setting now if you're familiar with my previous video about tuning grbl you'll know that the dollar 30 controls the rpm of the spindle or in relation to the laser it controls the amount of power being sent to the laser now the reason that this is important is because the test bottles that we'll be using have an s value of 1 000 now what that actually means is it's assuming that the control board we're working with also has an rpm value or a dollar 30 value of 1000. if they don't match your pair settings will not be accurate so what we need to do is align them up so if we go up to grbl grbl configuration and scroll down to our dollar 30 setting now you'll see i have 20 000 in here this is because i was using a 20 000 rpm rated spindle so what we do is click in here change this to 1000 and then click right now i'll talk a bit more about this when we start to look at light burn later on but for the purpose of this test we just need to make sure that is 1000 now the next thing we'll do is actually test that the laser itself is working so all we will do is click the two second button and it should turn the laser on for two seconds and then turn it back off excellent that's exactly what we expected to happen if yours isn't turning on then it may be one of various reasons possibly it isn't connected correctly you may not have turned the on and off button on the laser itself as i said that is quite a common cause or the other thing is maybe your grbl settings are quite right if for any reason you believe it may be your grbl settings what you may need to do is go and adjust that dollar 30 setting that we just set possibly your laser may be configured slightly different so you may need to take that figure up or down until you're able to see the actual laser beam itself now the test that we're going to start to do initially is about finding the focal point by your eye and the way that we're going to do this is to turn the laser on raise it up and down until we get the laser dot as small as we possibly can now doing this with the fixed laser if the fixed lens laser is simple we will simply be raising it up and taking it back down until we get to that point if you're doing this with a variable focal it will be slightly different you'll turn the laser on with the two seconds see how it looks go in manually adjust that lens maybe a quarter of a turn at a time turn it back on again now do be cautious do not put your hand in the way why the laser is turned on it will burn you but as we're working with the fix laser today i'm just going to show you a very quick video of what we can expect to see which is this and as you will see as it's rising up and down the size of the laser actually varies and you can see roughly at what point it is at its smallest point so now we'll do this at a little bit slower rate just so you can see it now unfortunately i do need to darken the camera right down in order for the camera to actually pick this up otherwise there is too much flare now in graham's tutorial he does recommend doing this on something like a piece of stainless steel there are various reasons for this one you are turning the laser on and if it's on something like paper or mdf it may eventually start to burn it which isn't what we're trying to do at this phase the other thing as well obviously stainless steel is more likely to be flat than a piece of paper now the reason i'm not doing it on stainless steel is purely because the camera struggles to pick it up due to the light flare so i'm just doing it on mdf but it should be okay for this purpose so what i'll do now is turn the laser on and i'm going to raise it up by a few millimeters as you can see that laser has slope slowly got wider as i've taken it up so we're going in the wrong direction now i'll bring it down as you can see it's getting smaller and smaller that's quite small now you should just be able to pick up that has got wider so bring it back up a little bit too far again i think a good starting point is going to be somewhere about there let's turn the laser back off i'll brighten the camera back up so you can see everything again now that we roughly have it in place and we know we're close to the focal point what we're going to do is load in a test file that graham created now as i say these will be in the download link within the description so we'll go up to file and click open file and we want to load in this one called laser focus test click open now as you can see there's a lot of lines on here what we're effectively aiming to do is we're going to draw 11 small lines across the bottom and this will show us where our test lines should actually appear these longer lines on top these are just done at a constant power setting but it will take the laser down by a couple of mil from where we are now slowly work up one millimeter at a time and then it will go past where we are at the moment until it's a couple of mil above the point the starting point now the purpose of this test is basically what we should see is either the lines will be thick and then they'll get thin into the middle and then back thicker again at the end but there may even not be a line at the start or the beginning just because the laser is struggling to burn at that level so for the purpose of this i'm just going to bring the laser over a little bit and start on one side because if we're going to do this test multiple times i'd rather work across from a systematic point of view so we can accurately track where we're going from one position to the other so what we'll do now is set the zero point for this because that's where we want it to start from and then we will fire this test up [Music] uh the nice sound tells us that it's done and out the y what i'll try and do is move that uh move the laser head out the way a little bit just so we can try and get a closer look at this now hopefully the camera should just be able to pick this up but obviously what we've got here is a very heavy line that's because we've gone past that focal point and as it started to raise up the lines got thinner and thinner and then it looks like at the last line it started to get a little bit thicker again so the laser has reset back to its original point which is that middle line there so what we need to do is raise the laser up maybe i know two or three mil at this point so if we go up one up two up three and bring it back a little bit now i'm going to take it over 10 mil and do another test again reset the zero and run the test and if i move the laser head back out the way again we can take another look at this and what we should see is now the thinnest line is actually in the middle of there now again if you've taken it one way too far or another you can just keep running this test until you get that the thinnest line is on that line right in the middle there i think i'm about happy with that because it looks like it's fairly even distribution either side if you want to get really picky you can start to raise and lower this by half a mil but at the end of the day it probably isn't going to make a huge amount of difference at half a mil steps the main thing that's important now is we need to know the measurements between the bottom of that laser down to the material there's a couple of different ways you can do this obviously one of the easiest methods is just using something like a ruler now as we can see from there that is about 20 mil the alternative option is if you have something like a vernier you can place this in rest it on the bottom and lift it up until the bottom of the laser and there we have they're showing about 14 mil from that that's not the same measurement as that but it is a consistent measurement that we can use now the reason that that measurement is so important is because what you can do is cut something down to that same size and it means that you know the exact depth your laser needs to be every time that you need to cut so therefore what you can simply do is every time you need to load in a job for example is let's set it up a bit we know that that's the height from the material that our laser needs to be so we can place that underneath the laser and lower it down slowly until it touches it and we know that's the perfect time to start doing our laser work so finding the focal point of the laser is really important but it doesn't end there we need to understand more about the laser especially in terms of its speed speeds and power ratings now when we're talking about the power of the laser this is the percentage input of the power that it's going to run at so something like 10 would be low and then 100 would be maximum power now with these diode lasers try not to run them at 100 too often because it will burn the laser out and shorten its life a bit like in previous calibration tests that we've done aim for a maximum of 80 percenter to any time that you're running it if possible keep it lower and it will extend the life of your laser now in order to find out about what this is capable of in terms of power and feeds and speeds the best way to do this is to simply experiment now what i've done is created a series of files in the speeds test files folder now there's probably a clever way to try and combine these all into one but i don't know it so they're all individual at the moment now what we'll do is open up one of these i'm going to start at about 800. now i know my laser is quite powerful so going anything slower than this will probably just set the piece of wood on fire so we'll start with 800 and i'll talk you through what this file will do now basically this will draw several lines of different pair items now as you can just about see on screen the fine to the line the less power is being applied applied and the darker the line obviously the more power so what this is basically going to do is draw five lines at different power ratings at i think it's 20 40 60 1800 and then below it will do five fills at similar ratings now the reason i'm doing it lines and fills is because you need to understand what it's capable of doing both sometimes you may just be drawing lines but other times you will want to fill in with the laser and sometimes the pair of settings can be different between them the reason for this if you imagine drawing a singular line it will just burn it nice and easy but when you're doing a fill this is a series of multiple lines burning next to each other one after another so therefore you're applying much more heat at any one concentrated time so there's a good chance that a single line will look lighter than a fill and it will also just reference the speed that it's running at above so that when we look back and we take a look at the piece of wood that we've done we can see that the different speeds it's run at basically just as a reference now it's also worth mentioning at this point that different woods will burn differently so even though we're testing on mdf now when you're testing on something like plywood or softboard or other hardwood you will have different results so with that explanation out the way what i'm now going to do is jog my machine to the far left over here and we're just going to run a series of tests going that way and let's see what we end up with let's move it about and bring it across to the side it'll start about there now what i should say is this particular piece that we're going to run the start point is in the center and i think if i remember correctly it's about 30 mil square all the way around so that's how much space you roughly need to have in order to run this piece so now we've got that in position we'll click zero and we'll press play now don't if the camera is picking that up it's got quite smoke in here because obviously we are burning wood what i am just quickly going to do is turn the extractor fan on top of the unit just try and pull a bit of that smoke out there now as i say i know my laser is quite powerful so at around 800 it does start to burn a little bit too much so if i just move this out of the way you can see that it's done some quite nice lines but at about 60 percent upwards it's quite a dark burn and there's not much graduation between those different um squares so let's jump up a little bit and try the 1000 now obviously that's another 200 millimeters on top in terms of speed so we'll take that back to roughly where it was and move it over another 30 mil actually we'll take it 40 and we'll reset the zero at that point and then run this new one if i move that eight the wire going not sure if the camera picks that up but there's a little bit more graduation but i think we can take that up another step as well what i also should mention at this point is obviously as you're burning wood you are going to get the fumes off it so make sure your area is well ventilated i'll take that over another few clicks again but this time i'm going to jump it up a little bit more and i'm going to go maybe up to the 1300 and we'll reset the zero again and then just click play now as we can see if you look at the first line in the first fill box on the 1300 it's very faint so we know we're starting to get to the edge of the the top speed that it can do using low power ratings i'm just going to do that once more but using the 1500 and we'll move that over again reset the zero and then we'll click the play button so again it's just another incremental step where we're increasing the speed and we just got a better idea of how much power we can apply at the same time as using speeds now as i say before you really start designing and using the laser to produce you know pictures and signs and things like that it's always good to get an idea of what it is capable of because say if you're using too much material so keep scraps of wood and do tests like this to understand what you can get out of it so one of the most common problems you often see when people first start using the laser is that all of the lines and boxes are joined up now the reason for this is because the the 3018 pro is still in spindle mode if you imagine when you're using the spindle the power to the spindle stays on as it's moving between different cutting paths now with the laser we don't want that to happen so if you are getting these lines what you need to make sure you've done is turn your laser mode on and this simply changes your dollar 32 setting to one which means the laser will cut off as it traverses between the different lines and paths that it's cutting the easiest way to check whether yours is on or off is go up to grbl grbl configuration and come down to your dollar 32 if it's on one that means you're in laser mode if it's on zero that means you're still in router mode you can either change that to a one in here and click right or simply click the laser mode on button and you'll see up here in your dialogue that it'll say dollar 32 equals one now when you continue to run the lights after this point that should get rid of all of the connecting lines but do remember if you go back to using a spindle you will need to change this back to dollar 32 equal zero so that's one thing to remember as you're interchanging between a laser and a spindle so hopefully it goes as smooth for you and you find the focal point nice and quickly and are able to get the experiments done with the feed speeds and the power settings now i wasn't physically able to show you how to adjust a variable lens today because i don't have one but if you are struggling with it remember you can just treat it like a fixed lens and raise the z axis up and down as we did today to find that focal point now in the next episode we'll look to actually create something and output it like a logo or a name tag just so we can have a bit more fun with it before i wrap up the video i just want to mention two things really quickly firstly these components the lasers can be produced quite cheaply around the world so do consider buying them from more reputable places maybe something like soundsmart because the quality of the components and customer services are better quality the other thing is whenever you are burning anything like this it will obviously generate smoke so make sure you're in a well ventilated area and if possible just try and have something blowing the smoke away because it will damage the laser and the smoke can build up on the lens itself so if you do start to find that you know the material is burning or giving off lots of smoke you may need to clean your laser lens at some point because of the buildup so that is everything for today's video thank you very much for watching if you found it useful as always give it a thumbs up and please subscribe to the channel and i'll see you all on the next video

Channel: James Dean Designs

Views: 297,741

Keywords: 3018PRO, 3018 pro, 3018 pro CNC, CNC, CNC for beginners, 3018, 3018pro build, 3018 pro assembly, small cnc, desktop cnc, laser cnc, woodworking cnc, woodworking, building 3018, building 3018pro, testcut, test cut, first cut, CNC software, Using 3018, 3018 beginner, 3018pro beginner, cnc enclosure, 3018 tips ticks, cnc tips tricks, cnc help, laser, diode laser, cnc laser, laser help, setting up a laser, laser issues

Id: YnFNFEdmPjU

Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020