Cooper explains that they’ve prepared a special fork of the LaserWeb4 for use with EDM that will constantly lower the Z height at the proper rate to counteract the electrode itself becoming shorter over time.
@easytarget @cprezzi have they been in touch about this?
No, not that I have noticed anyway.
That said, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen an article about people doing EDM with 3d printers, I saw an article with a similar setup recently (might have been the same one). An interesting project.
I’m guessing they modified lw-comm.server rather than the LaserWeb app itself. That’s what I’d do anyway; it’s easier to add an ever increasing Z offset there than having to play with the gcode generator(s!) in the main webapp.
Wouldn’t you want to add to Z only while actually in contact with the metal being cut?
I just skimmed the HackChat, lots of interesting discussion there and a classic ‘expert’ trying to prove it’ss a scam, somehow.
Anyway, there is some discussion of firmwares etc, and the announcement that there will be a LW4 fork for this (targeting Marlin, presumably). I’m OK with that so long as they publish their mods, and retain credits etc.
I’ll look further at this when at home and I have a desktop for easier reading. I’d like to touch base with them since, apart from anything else, I’m curious about exactly how they do it.
Part of the ‘cleverness’ of this is that you do not need to modify the Ender’s firmware, they apply the ‘wear rate’ calculation to the gcode instead, which seems pretty sensible to me, beter than requiring a firmware mod.
Yes, I’m imagining starting with mill cut path (that will do Z lift between cuts) coupled to a post processor that adds a z offset continually while doing G1 cuts but not otherwise.
This could be done as part of the path generation itself, but more likely as a post-processing operation, either in LW or in lw-comms.server (which is, imho, easier to implement. The path generators are complex, fragmented and not nice to work with).
I have implemented automatic Z height adjustment with a modified Smoothieware firmware, a PLC and a special circuitry board. It is very machine specific though as the laser cutting heads needs to support this. I guess with the EDM it may even be easier.