Luigi

FabLab Laser Cutter
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@Christian @ssaner with the card reader now in place, is there a way to find out who destroyed the luigi laser and didn’t bother to tell anyone?
Also is there a possible eta on getting it fixed?

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It’s not destroyed, and we got an email right after it happened. I fixed the probe last night, but didn’t get a chance to test it and level the bed. If someone who is comfortable doing that wants to take care of it they can feel free to do so. I probably won’t be back there until tomorrow evening.

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It sure would be nice if there was some sort of forum we could post on, informing everyone of down machines. That way some of us wouldn’t have to drive 20-30 minutes to the space to find out the hard way.

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Yeah, it would also be nice if some of us didn’t have to fix something every time we walked through the door. But hey, nothing is perfect, right? :upside_down_face: :man_shrugging:

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@Christian can you teach me to fix potential issues with the laser? When i went by earlier it looked like someone hit the bed with a sledge hammer. The entire bed looked like it needed to be replaced.

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Sure. I’m willing to teach anyone who wants to help fix things.

I ended up needing to pick something up from the makerspace last night, so I finished fixing the laser. The bed is less pretty than it was before, but that won’t really affect anything. I bent it back to being mostly flat.

I think I figured out what caused the issue. I will update once I’ve confirmed the sequence of events.

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So here’s what happened:

The file that was being run had a -2mm Z offset to defocus the beam slightly for better engraving. This is normally fine, but the person using it forgot to autofocus. This would also normally not cause a crash like this, but apparently when the laser first starts up it sets the Z height to 3000mm. When you autofocus it sets the height to zero. So since it wasn’t set to zero, when it started the cut file it went to move the bed to -2mm, causing it to ram the head into the bed and the emergency stop was pressed. The next mistake was turning the laser back on when the head was in contact with bed; any time the machine powers on it moves the head to the home position. This caused it to drag across the bed and bend the honeycomb. An email was sent right after this happened, but I don’t think a note was left on the machine, so someone else came in shortly after and turned the machine on again, causing more bending of the honeycomb.

So the takeaways from this are:

  • Always autofocus, but especially if you have a Z offset in the file
  • Never turn the machine on if head is in contact with the honeycomb
  • If there is an issue that causes a machine to be unusable, unplug it and leave a note so that nobody else tries to use it and causes more damage
  • Always watch the machine in case something goes wrong
    • The damage would have been much worse if the person wasn’t paying attention and ready to stop the machine

We should try to figure out if there is a way to make the Z position default to 0mm when the machine starts up. That would prevent this issue entirely.

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Thanks Christian, you put in a tremendous amount of time and effort at MakeICT. It is appreciated, even if it seems to go unnoticed sometimes. :medal_military::medal_military::medal_sports::medal_military::medal_military:

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Yes … super job at getting to the crux of the problem.

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Yes Christian a big thanks for your awesomeness help!!!