My adventures with Auggie.

[ArtF]

Tweaky:

I doubt if a real manual will ever be forthcoming on Auggie,
Its such a specialty program that few will adopt it, in truth it
was written for myself and YNN, who contributed the greyscale
for you. It was fun to write though so it became more than I
envisioned.
    We'll see how it develops over time if indeed I get it doing
3d printing it may be useful to a larger group of users to
be feasible. Its all one reason I was very happy to see you
got it running with no real assistance. Proves its possible. :)


Art

[Ya-Nvr-No]

Thanks Guys

Tweakie: History has proven from your past detailed posts on your website and other forum's,  That you're great at passing on your journey to learn and share knowledge. You're the perfect candidate to pass on your recent learning curve.  We feel Auggie is a true functional tool for not only laser work but teaching and understanding how scripting is written & applied and is not difficult or black magic. There are lots of examples and I have so many more to glean from.

One issue is both Art and I go from one wild idea project to the next. I think we go by the squeaky wheel principle, we are here to help and share what we have learned. It was great & impressive to see from your experience there was a limited squeak. Wait till you learn how to create panels or edit your screen set and then learn the true power of Auggie.

Nice to hear my website was useful for more than my understanding of Robots, Crawlers and the inquisitive. (Awstats=interesting data collector)

[tweakie]

Unfortunately I don?t know enough about Auggie to contribute anything at all towards a manual but if you think it would help or be of any assistance to others (bearing in mind that my laser is set-up is entirely differently to the norm.) then I could do something like a .pdf write-up on what I did to get my system working.

I agree that the cost of the 57CNC may be a limiting factor here but, hopefully, there will be followers. I am sure you all know but my main interest is in the 8 bit photo etching aspects of Auggie (I really do need to move on from the LPT parallel port operation associated with the Mach3 plugin) but each user will, I am sure, have a different priority or interest.

I can see a great potential for Auggie, it is just a matter of getting it noticed.

Tweakie.

[ArtF]

Hi Tweaky:

  Thanks, very generous of you. Any experiences you have would be
greatly appreciated, you can post them here on the forum under Auggies
topics. Im going on the theory that anyone interested will have enough
information in the forums to get them running.

  Im not highly motivated to push Auggie as a controller, it was written with
an experimenters motive, so I opened it up enough to do almost anything
that ones wants it to do within reason. It isn't for the meek though, or
those new to such things unless they are dedicated. I know from running
Mach3 that I don't really want to support a CNC controller for the general
population, I'm past that workload requirement, :), but I'm more than willing
to support a hobby community of users that have the  interest and drive
to make it work for them and support each other.

  So please post any things you found confusing, Im willing to bet those that
follow you will have similar concerns and may be shy to ask. (Though
no-one should ever be shy to ask.. ). Also feel free to mention your experiences
to others that you think may have similar needs. 

  We're always happy to have new blood around here, fresh minds make for
fresh ideas. You may want to mention to anyone interested that Auggie is a free program, it doesn't require any license, and is now a separate download. I
made it that way as a payback to the CNC community for over a decade of
support.

Glad your having fun with it.
Art

[tweakie]

Now you have to use a bit of imagination here because this result is really not very good (still learning) but I thought it may be of interest.

This image was produced using Auggie and an Impact Electromagnet.

Tweakie.

[ArtF]

Well, I have to say its pretty good. The patterns seem almost random, but from any distance the effect is very good. Was this done witht he laser PWM output? , or just
a binary ouput?

Art

[tweakie]

Hi Art,

That was just using the binary data from the PWM output (I am still working on the magnet driver which will convert the PWM to impact weight).

Tweakie.

[ArtF]

Thx

I was wondering if the pwm would work for an impact.. seems it does,. :)

Art

[tweakie]

Impact magnet operation is definitely possible with Auggie but axis velocity has to be a lot slower than with laser.
Although the cost of diode lasers is constantly falling an impact magnet set-up is relatively cheap and it makes a remarkably good job on binary materials (such as granite). Who knows, it may give Auggie an appeal to an entirely different group of users.

Tweakie.

[tweakie]

A previously used image converted from 8 bit greyscale to 1 bit dithered and then reproduced using an impact magnet.

Tweakie.

[ArtF]

wow, certainly decorates an aluminum plate. Nice work!

Art

[tweakie]

Thanks Art.

Tweakie.

[tweakie]

This 1 bit image was laser produced (etching black paint off aluminium).

Something I would like to be able to do is a similar image (which has not been dithered) using an impact magnet but I am unable to reduce the Pulse Repetition Frequency of the PWM signal to below 1kHz.

Is there any way to get the PRF down to a minimum of say 10Hz or so ?

Tweakie.

[ArtF]

Tweaky:

  Nice graphic..

  Ill check on next opening of Auggie's code. It seems to me that
the laser-spindle library has a setting of the base frequency,
set currently to 5khz base, but I think by editing the  laser-spindle
file you can change the 5khz to anything..

Art

[ArtF]

Tweaky:

  If you hit the LIB button and open the GCode folder, youll find the
laser-spindle library, its in C Script and starts with

global LaserAxis = p.GetInt("Axis",8);
global LaserMaxPower = 100;  //max power = 100%
global LaserPWMPeriod = p.GetFloat("Period",.0002); //for 5khz tickle 
global LaserPWMChannel = p.GetInt("Channel",4);
//get a pokeys link for the spindle
global SpindleControl = Motion();

  If you change .0002 to the period youd like to check, it should work
so that you go from 0-100% with a period of whatever you set. So if
youd like 1khz, just set to .001 for the period instead of .0002 as my laser
uses.
 
  If you look through the file youll find the macros that actually control
the laser output and you can vary them as you like.

Art