Red laser issues and Eagle User Language Program
We are still testing the focus system with the red laser.
It was easy to turn the laser on but unfortunally the red diode needs less current than the blue and when we turn it on it auto-destroyed. It happend three times till we deducted the problem, so we killed three pickups during this testing. Now that we know the problem we are limiting the current of the red laser diode and.....
it is solved!!
Another issue we found was electric noise. We re-designed the first version of the Pickup Driver circuit and put in the same PCB some components which in the first version were on the Arduino UNO shield. Now, in MKII, we are using Arduino Mega and Ramps so we don’t need the Arduino UNO shield any more, but it had the power supply regulation circuit and the Mosfet driver which move the lens coils which we still need in MKII. No problem. We designed a small circuit with a 7805 for the regulation and put it near the fan because it gets hot easily. But we made the mistake to put the focus lens Mosfet driver on the main Pickup PCB. This driver generates a lot of electric noise because is controlled by PWM. And the worst: it inducts the noise in the FE signal we use to detect the S-Curve and focus the laser. Result: it doesn’t focus any more. So we are now re-designing the circuit in order to split it in two parts and put in one PCB the power supply regulation and the “noisy circuit” and the rest of components in the other.
Meantime I wrote some code to help the generation of g-code from CadSoft Eagle. Eagle has a fantastic feature called ULP (User Language Program). As its name suggests, it is a language which allows any user to write programs which runs inside Eagle. It can be used to access all the Eagle data structures and to create a wide variety of output files. So I wrote two small ULP programs to generate two g-code files: one for the Drill Toolhead and other for the Solder Paste Dispenser. It was very easy and funny and I was wondering if someday we were able to do it so easily and funny with the Windows API :-). So, congratulations to the Eagle CaSoft staff for this excellent work.
This is the look-and-feel of these small programs:
