Epilog Fusion Edge: Exploring Epilog Laser's Newest Laser Machine

hi i'm bob henry product manager at epilog laser with over 30 years of laser system design and manufacturing experience and building on our success with a state-of-the-art fusion pro laser we're really excited to introduce the new laser system the fusion edge today we'll be demonstrating the new edge machine along with our updated epilogue job management software suite in 2019 we introduced the fusion pro our top of the line large format laser cutting and engraving system with the new fusion edge machine we've integrated the same modern camera system high speed engraving touch screen display control and delivered it in a compact and affordable package laser engraving and cutting technology is an invaluable tool for manufacturers designers engineers creatives students just about anyone who needs marking cutting and engraving capabilities we're continuing to deliver advanced features and functionality while improving accessibility by making this incredibly versatile equipment easier to use today we're going to feature the new fusion edge 12 co2 and fiber based laser systems we're going to emphasize engraving speeds up to 120 inches per second our iris camera positioning system laser touch screen display the safeguard features of the fusion machines and of course we'll be doing some engraving and cutting along the way thanks for joining us today with that let's get started before we start processing some materials in the fusion edge machine let's talk a little bit about the availability of lasers and sizes with the fusion edge 12 machine it has a 24 inch by 12 inch work area offered with 30 40 50 or 60 watt laser tubes we also offer the edge 12 machine with a 30 watt fiber laser for metal marking and engineer plastic marking applications let's take a quick tour inside the machine before we start some material processing the front door of the machine is tempered glass safety interlocked like all epilogue lasers to ensure safe operation the first thing you'll notice is the ferromagnetic integrated vector grid of course this is magnetized you're if you're working with material that has a slight warp to it it's really nice to just use magnets and drop them on the material that'll keep the material nice and flat for engraving and cutting applications we've got the slightly oversized 24 by 12 inch work area here now let's talk about our lens assembly there's some really unique features in here using the joystick control on the control panel i'll move the lens assembly out to the middle of the table so we can see that a little bit better first thing you'll notice here is this tubing this is the air assist all epilog edge machines are built with air assist included you'll notice the tube comes down into the cone this creates a positive pressure where we're always blowing air through the cone the intent is to provide for good and clean cutting applications but also to protect the optic inside of the cone assembly another really unique feature with this machine is the autofocus it's built into our lens assembly here so when you have autofocus selected in our job management software the table is going to come up and engage the material it's going to depress the cone and then it's going to come back down to the proper focal distance we've got a two millimeter actuator in here that serves as our autofocus that works really well super convenient for a variety of different things if you're more interested or prefer to do manual focus we have a great little focus gauge here that hangs on the front of the machine hangs right there and then you'll raise the table up until the material engages the gauge and then you can just simply take this off and you're ready to go for our rotary device that's available with this machine we have a secondary focus gauge location here that provides for the gauge to be center line over the axis of the rotary so two really convenient locations to do the manual focus work with the table lowered you'll see that we have some down draft vents built into the back side of the machine this allows for smoke to be pulled up the bottom of the machine and then sucked out through the plenum through these ports here you'll also notice that we've got the rotary attachment plug device right there if you're doing rotary work marking cylinders with our rotary attachment of course this would plug in here another unique thing you'll see on all fusion machines is this interesting pattern on the inside of the machine this is installed in all edge and pro machines this is used to calibrate the camera systems in the machine integrated into every epilogue fusion product is our safeguard features this includes a belt system here which is really tight on the rail that keeps contaminants debris smoke from migrating into the bearing system located behind the belt and then on the side of the machine you'll notice that we have bellows that keep particulates and contaminants from migrating outside of the workspace ideally we have all of the particulates of smoke going through the back of the machine through the plenum but the safeguard features are built in just to keep the contaminants the smoke the debris from migrating off to the side of the machine as well as part of the vector grid setup we have an integrated crumb tray that's located in the bottom of the machine this is really handy for when you're cutting small pieces and some of those pieces fall through to the bottom of the laser with the front service panel removed we now have access to the chrome tray you'll notice that we've got some material that have dropped through the vector grid with the chrome tray it's really easy to collect those materials and dump them into the garbage and then replace the tray when you're done with all fusion products from epilogue we have the ability to connect to the computer through either a network cable or a usb cable you'll also notice that we have a laser status indicator light bank here and over here we have exhaust control this is coming soon where the laser can control the function on and off of the exhaust fan this last port is a little usb port where you would upgrade the firmware to the laser system periodically we make improvements or changes to the firmware that controls the laser system we'll issue that through our website really easy to download that and then plug it into this port and that automatically takes you through an upgrade sequence through the machine let's take a few minutes and talk about the control panel on the fusion edge machine you'll notice that it's a seven inch touch screen display at the bottom we've got the start button this is how you start a job if you wanted to pause it midway through you could press that button as well here's the joystick that controls the movement of the gantry and also the focus here you'll see we have the up and down arrow this is our focus button if we press that and then we can lower and raise the table as we need to if we wanted to perform a autofocus function here we could do that through this company this control panel by pressing the autofocus button the next button is simply the red dot pointer this is just a simple toggle on and off this is a really handy tool for previewing work or locating a relocatable home position if you're using center engraving type of applications and then the last button on the control panel is the joystick so we press that this gives us the ability then to move the gantry wherever we want over the entire workspace we have the ability to do autofocus here as well this is a really neat feature here i'm going to show this to you this is called our trace feature if we pick a particular job and then place press the trace feature on the control panel it's going to trace all around where our particular job is going to go this is handy just to make sure that if you've got an odd shaped item that where the graphic is going to go is in the space that you intend it to again this is just a simple toggle you can move this around let this run and then place your object under that and then simply turn it off when you're done at the top of the control panel you notice that we have some functions here this stack is our jobs list this allows you to select the job that you want to run by simply pressing on it and highlighting it that job will be selected and you can run that if you wanted more detail about the information on that job you can press and hold it gives you a little thumbnail sketch of what the graphic is going to look like it also gives you information on speed power and the resolution that we're going to run on that job really handy feature for verifying that you're running the right job and that you've selected the correct speed and power combination i'll go back to the jobs list here i'm going to open up a different job if i wanted to save this job in the laser so if i come back to it in a couple days i want to rerun it and i don't want to have to print it from the software i can press the save button by doing so i've saved that job in the laser itself so i turn the laser off and come back the next day and turn it back on that job will auto populate in the control panel in the settings tab this is where we set up a new machine so when you get a new epilogue edge machine you'll want to go through these set up steps the first one is what language do you want to run if we program through it prompts you to set up your exhaust the next step is really pretty neat we include with each machine some anodized aluminum that allows you to program a job into the machine you'll see this is our epilogue demo that comes with a machine place your anodized aluminum on the bed of the laser and the machine will run it automatically for you if we go back into the setup function just to make sure that everything is complete here we select whether we're going to run usb or ethernet or wireless connection select one of those here's instructions for you to install the software suite on your computer information about how to save a job you'll notice this little save icon you can save a job at the control panel in the jobs list by just pressing that button and then finally congratulations you're all set up we're going to spend a few minutes now talking about the epilogue software suite you'll notice on screen here that we've got some graphics loaded in we're going to push this through to the epilogue software suite so when you click on print you get this dialog box and here you just simply click on print and that will send this job over to the software suite you'll notice that we've got our image that we processed through coreldraw you'll also notice that we've got the camera view we're looking at down on the table where we've got four coasters set up you'll also notice that we've got this area here this is the engravable area this area comes through to the software suite the same page size that you sent over through coreldraw or similar software to make sure that we can engrave in the space that we need to we just simply click on that border and then we drag that engravable area over and now we have a clean area where we can do the engraving on these coasters so again you notice we've got a good camera view looking down on the bed of the laser you see our graphics sitting here we sent this graphic over as one grouped item so we'll need to separate these so then we can move those graphics around and place them on those coasters for engraving so to do that you just simply click on the the object and then click over here which is the ungroup and then we have the ability then to select each of these items and we can just move them around one of the really nice features with the software suite is the ability to zoom in this gives you a lot better scaling so you can place the artwork a little bit better i'm going to grab this one here and move it over as well you'll notice of course that the graphic is much too large to fit on that coaster so in the software suite we can reduce the size down to what we want we also have the ability to rotate that graphic here as well which is a great feature you can rotate to a specific angle or you can use this function over here and rotate to an exact angle so if you select 90 degrees for that you'll see that our graphic rotates around 90 degrees so i'm going to zoom in on this and get this object placed nice and center on the coaster there and then i'm going to zoom out again and grab the next object i'm going to pull this over and then again zooming in with just the wheel on my mouse i'm able to place that object that looks a little bit large for that space so i'm going to shrink this one down a little bit and then move it to the center as well i like to use those bounding boxes the black boxes around the graphic as a tool to help me center using the camera on the object to be engraved and then we'll bring our bear over here same idea we're gonna scale this down and drop that in the middle maybe make that a little bit bigger so the bear takes up a little more space on our coaster and that looks pretty good right there so we're ready to engrave at this point so you'll notice that we've got all of the graphic images that we sent over as one group we've split those apart and then we've moved those around manipulated the location in this case we rotated the image as well so now we're ready to engrave a few of the things i'd like to show you here with the software suite functionality before we move on is the group and ungroup function this is what we did when we sent the four images over but we needed to separate those in order to place them on the individual items to be engraved this allows us to select a specific location where we want to move a graphic so if we wanted that to be at 10.5 inches over we could just simply click on the five here and you'll notice that it'll move our graphic great way to do very specific and detailed location marking as well today we're just using our camera function for the locating those parts you can change the size of the object as well if we wanted to make that three inches in height you'll notice that it gets bigger as well and then of course control z the undo button will always bring you back to the original size of the object so at this point we're ready to engrave a few of the things i want to show you here we have the processes which is the engraving and or cutting we are just engraving with this job so we're not actually using any vector cutting functionality so you'll notice that the job came through it's listed over here we can set up the resolution to any specific value that we want most of the time engraving looks really good especially on wood at 500 dpi if you're doing more detailed smaller engraving you might set that a little bit higher but generally you can set the engraving for wood at 500 dpi the default when the job comes through to the software suite is 500 but also you can set a resolution for any value that you want i can set it for 832 so it's fully scalable from 1 to 1200 dpi we'll switch this back to 500 here because that's a good value for this the speed we can set as well we can speed set any speed value combinations we've got a a great library built into the software suite as well our laser system manual has those same data for laser system parameters also we're going to use a standard dithering pattern here these are dithering patterns that work really well for some objects we develop these with photograph engraving there are a lot of good photograph specific software out there now but yeah generally you can set different dithering patterns which gives you a slightly different dot placement laser dot placement when you're engraving here i'm going to show you this really cool import function when you build a library of material settings you can click on those click on the import button and then click on the coasters and it'll import those values that we want to use you'll see that those data change now from speed 60 to a power 100 for this particular job so it's a really powerful tool for you to save laser parameters for different materials you can categorize categorize them by material type or maybe a customer name but it's a really handy way to categorize all of your laser parameter work and then recall that just import that later without having to reference the manual or the guide here in the software suite so at this point we're ready to print a couple more things i want to show you here with the main tabs at the top of the page the processes tab this just gives you a larger blowout of all of the laser processes over here you'll see the direction engraving direction this would indicate that we're engraving from the bottom of the objects to the back of the machine to the top of the object and here we would be engraving from the top down to the bottom i'm going to select the bottom to top engraving for this and then again all of the laser parameters are set here the advanced tab is a really handy feature as well the standard or the engraving type we're going to be doing standard we also can do rubber stamp and 3d engraving but for our work today it's standard engraving we could also specify the number of copies so if you're trying to get really deep into wood and you want to really maybe run two or three passes you can select three there that will automatically do one and then two and then three passes over the objects to give you more depth into the material we're just going to be doing one pass today or one copy the centering point is a really handy feature too we're not going to go into a lot of detail here but this allows you to select move the lens assembly in the laser system and select a specific point on the object that you want to engrave if you selected center center that red spot that is illuminating on your object to be engraved would be the center of that graphic so here we're just going to select none because we've got it all set up with our camera view notes allows you to put in any notes specific to the job that you're working on so a lot of really great features here and then also i want to show you here we can give this a different name if you're sending over a lot of jobs to the laser they're all going to populate in the 7-inch touch screen display so you can select any one of those graphics i find that if i change the name of this particular file i'm able to more easily locate the file that i'm looking for just a really another handy feature here we can select a variety of different laser systems to print from as well with all of the epilog lasers you're able to print from one computer to any number of epilogue lasers through a network connection similarly if you have a network computer you can print from any network computer to any networked epilogue laser so a really handy feature here you're just selecting the machine that you want to print to so we're going to print to 3.13 which is the ip address that we've established for this particular job so now we're ready to go we're going to press on the print button and the job will be sent over to the laser once we've sent the job to the laser system you'll notice on the control panel that we have a number of jobs loaded up in here the last job that we sent over is the forest animals job you'll see that that's highlighted if i wanted to run that job of course i would want to highlight it but if i want to do epilogue demo or the security tags job i would just simply click on it with the touch screen display and then i'm able to run that job before we do that let's verify that we have the correct focus set up so at the display panel i'm going to use the joystick command and i'm going to run the lens assembly over to the object that we're going to engrave on and then at the display panel i'm going to click on auto focus you notice the table comes up it engages a autofocus plunger built into the cone assembly it goes through a lift process the lens assembly is engaged and the table comes back down to the correct focal distance for this job i'll hit reset and then back to our jobs list of course i need to close the door in order for the laser to fire so i'm going to close the door and then once i've selected the job on the control panel i click on the start button [Music] now recall that we set this up to engrave from the bottom to the top so it always goes to the bottom object and then it's going to engrave from the front of the machine to the back of the machine [Music] once the job's complete we can open the door and inspect our engraving you'll see that that camera does a really nice job of accurately locating those parts always good to be under camera center for the most accurate placement but you can see we've got some really nice engraving into that wood our next project is going to be some rough cut wood we're going to place this on the bed of the edge 12 machine co2 based laser so we put it on the bed of the laser anywhere in the middle kind of under camera center here we're showing the auto focus sequence once that's done we're in the correct focal plane for the material and then we send the artwork over with all epilogue laser systems we're able to use a variety of software programs here we're using adobe illustrator coreldraw is quite popular as well many different software programs work really well with the epilogue machines kind of a personal preference so here we're just printing the image over to the laser system you can see that we've got camera view from our iris camera system looking down onto the bed of the laser we can see our wood there here we're just adjusting the size of the artwork to fit on the material we cannot rotate it we can also scale it to fit the object and then once that's done we're ready to go so now we'll set the laser parameters for this particular job it's a soft wood so we'll use a little bit lower resolution we know some good laser parameters for wood so we'll plug those in now and then once that's done we'll print the job over to the laser system once you print the job over to the laser system it'll show up on the display panel this is a seven inch touchscreen display that will show all the jobs that you've loaded into the laser system to select the job you want simply touch it on the display panel and then hit the start button and the engraving will start once the laser system is finished we'll open the door and take a look you can see we've got some really nice contrast here a little bit softer wood a really nice color on there amazingly simple to set this up with the iris camera system one of the many amazing features of the fusion edge products is of course with the overhead camera we're able to take a picture of an item on the bed of the laser in this case we're going to do just that and use that picture to create a jig to engrave on multiple items so here we just use a nice white background place our object that we're going to create the jig for on the bed of the laser we'll focus of course so we're in the correct focal plane so we have a good accurate dimensional representation of the part that we're creating the jig for so once that's done we'll move the lens assembly out of the way and then we'll print over to our software suite here's the overhead view looking down on the table with our part installed in our software suite we can take a picture of this background so we're going to do that using the button on the upper left there looks like the on the panorama with a small magnifying glass in it and once we're done there we can export that image into common software again coreldraw adobe illustrator so here we've loaded that image into coreldraw now we'll go through some bitmap editing features within coreldraw to clean up that image the first thing we'll do is to get rid of some of the background so we're just going to crop out some of that background use just the image of the part for our bitmap tracing function once that's done we're going to use the bitmap trace function and kind of break this thing apart here we can use a variety of different techniques to get an image that works really well here we can set different levels of color in there you'll notice that there are a number of different colors so if we set that down to just a few we get more of a consistent image to process we won't go into a lot of detail about how to set up this artwork in coreldraw really we just want to demonstrate the ability to take a picture of the image there's the original image and the modified image through corel trace and now we're going to really just create a cut line around that image that we've created once we have that shape all set then we select an outline a hairline cut line around that and we get rid of the fill of course the laser recognizes hairline as a cut line and then we'll apply laser parameters for that cutting for these objects so here we're just duplicating that image across the page we've got a 24 by 12 inch work area in the fusion edge 12 machine so we're just going to populate that entire space with these images that we've created once the graphic image is complete we'll load up our template material onto the bed of the laser we're just using common architectural or signage plastic here the image is all set up now we'll go into the software suite here we've turned the camera off we don't really need the camera on for this we've already created the image we know we're just going to be cutting the material so we'll set laser parameters that we know work really well for that plastic material and then click on print and again the job gets sent over to the laser the co2 laser and the fusion edge 12 machine is a wonderful wavelength of light for so many different types of materials this is just one example of the many types of materials that you can engrave and cut with the laser system the iris camera system and the fusion edge machines are incredibly versatile they're great for locating artwork on a particular item but they're also really useful for this type of application where we're using the camera in the system to help us to build a jig for engraving or cutting on a variety of components once we've cut the images or the shapes out of the template material then we can load up our parts for this particular job we're just engraving five of the items so in curl draw software we'll select those five that we want to engrave of course you could load up the entire jig with as many parts will fit in this case we're just going to do five so we select those five here you get a display of what we're going to be engraving and then again set the laser parameters for this job once those are complete click on print and again the job gets sent over to the laser system for our customers that do a lot of repetitive part marking this is an extremely efficient way to create fixturing or jigging for those parts of course the part can be the fixture can be used many times when you're switching between parts or different shapes you create jigs for those different things you just reinstall the jig you need for the part all the artwork is located accordingly and you're ready to go with our next project we're going to use a variety of different types of materials with different thicknesses and materials too and show you how the color mapping feature in the epilogue software suite can be used for engraving a variety of different materials at the same time so here we've got some images created you see that we have leather and dura mark material anodized aluminum and some wood that we're going to engrave so again we've created the graphic image we're using adobe illustrator for this job and then again print it over to the software suite so here you can see the images that have been printed over so in this case a great feature in the software suite is to ungroup all those images this gives us the ability then to place those individual objects wherever we want in that space and so we ungroup those images and then we'll be locating those specific images where they need to go again using the camera view on the laser system to help us to accurately place those images on the item to be engraved so here we're adjusting the location zooming in as well to help us so we can drag this image down drop it right where it needs to be you'll notice that we've got different colors in here we're going to use those colors to help us to define laser parameters specific to those different colors once we place those images on the various materials that we're going to engrave we'll use a great feature in here called split by color so here we can have the software suite identify the different colors that we've incorporated or imported into the software and then we can specify laser parameters specific to those different colors recall that the red image was wood and so we'll use a little bit higher power looking for a little more depth into the material great feature here as well the offset feature this tells the laser system bed to go down the distance equal to the thickness of the material so you don't have to refocus between each of those different materials it's done automatically through our software given giving instructions to the laser system to change the focal plane for those different thickness materials we can also for convenience change the name of the color if you will to specify the type of material that we're going to be engraving on once we have all the laser parameters for those different colored objects created then we simply click on the print button and the job gets sent over to the laser system using the advanced features in the fusion pro and fusion edge laser systems gives our customers the ability to do a wide variety of job setups different types of materials individual part marking or cutting or in the case of this demonstration the ability to do mixed media materials using our color mapping feature with the adjustable laser parameters and the adjustable focal plane really amazing feature most of the time our customers are using only one or a few processes the beauty of the epilogue fusion products is the ability to do so many different things this was a a somewhat complicated setup with a variety of different colors and thickness of materials that just wanted to demonstrate the capabilities of the machine and the ability to do these types of engraving projects using epilogue's unique software suite we were able to do a variety of different types of materials at different focal planes all in one job setup by using our color mapping feature again setting laser parameters specific to each material using the camera system to locate the artwork and then having the laser system table move up and down to get to the right focal plane for those different height materials the log laser manufactures a variety of co2 based laser systems co2 lasers are great for a lot of organic material like wood glass acrylics textiles cork leather rubber they're not particularly great for direct metal marking and engraving however so for our customers that need metal marking capabilities or metal engraving capabilities we offer fiber based systems fiber lasers produce a different wavelength of light than co2 and they're really good for direct metal engraving and marking applications both in raster and in vector format applications fiber lasers are great for any type of metal they're also great for engineered plastic material black marble engraves quite nicely with the fiber laser as well for those direct metal engraving and marking jobs it's a perfect wavelength of light epiloc offers a really affordable package on a fiber laser we've got fiber lasers available at 30 or 50 watt levels and available in our fusion edge 12 and our fusion pro laser systems as well depending on the type of metals you can achieve a variety of different types of marks with a fiber laser bare aluminum tends to give you a whitish color to a dark gray color on a lot of steel and titanium materials you can get a much wider variety of materials the more common are a polished mark which is kind of a whitish color this produces really nice contrast for some materials that are a bit more reflective and a kneel mark as well this is more of a surface mark at the the top of the metal where we're changing the color of the surface material to a black mark this is common in the medical device industry they want a surface mark where they don't want engraving into the metal that could harbor bacteria so an annealed mark again very common in the medical device industry and then just general marking applications or engraving applications we call it an etch type of mark where we're removing a layer of material providing some depth into the material for more permanence on a lot of materials depending on the customer's applications and need in terms of plastics a co2 laser will typically give you some depth into the material and if it's a uniform one color plastic you get sort of a tone on tone look with a fiber laser the wavelength created by the fiber laser will oftentimes give you a nice contrasting mark on the surface of the plastic here we're engraving some stainless steel using different types of laser parameters to achieve different types of marks on the surface of the metal here we've got some whitish mark we call that the polished mark we also have the brownish mark of the etch and then the dark surface mark we call annealing this particular job shows both raster and as well vector marking of course vector we're following a specific line segment much like a plotter where with engraving or marking we're doing left and right much like a printer would this is done all in one job again using our color mapping technique where we assign a color to those different images on our material or in our graphic and then applying different laser parameters to create those different looks or colors on the surface of the metal it's all done in one job so you don't have to send over multiple jobs it's again just a great example of using the full features and capability of the laser system to do a variety of things in one job on one piece of material one distinctive feature of the fiber laser is the green window that we have on the top of the laser system we have a glass and then also a layer of lexan material that's got an organic dye in it that will absorb the fiber laser light energy this is important for safety reasons all laser systems all fiber based laser systems will have this type of green tinting on the viewing window many of our customers require depth into the metal component that they're engraving it's really easy to set that up in the software suite where we specify the number of cycles or passes that we want the laser to do to achieve the depth that we're looking for of course running a job multiple passes will produce more depth into the material epilogue laser fiber-based machines are an incredibly efficient way to do part marking on a variety of different shapes and sizes of material great for barcodes serialization graphic engraving into various materials as well thank you for joining us today if you'd like to learn more about the fusion edge or any of the other epilogue laser products give us a call or look us up online at epiloguelaser.com [Music] you

Channel: Epilog Laser

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Length: 40min 12sec (2412 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021