@dannym said in the old Google Group
Peal is a “Royal Mark” but that is actually a rebranded Universal Laser
X100 (same mfg as our other 2). Structurally, it’s the same frame and
motion axes as the PLS660 (“Blue”). However it’s fitted with a
water-cooled 100W RF-CO2 pulse laser, which is older but awesome.
Got it, thanks. I could swear the earlier link worked last week, so maybe they helpfully reorganized their file listing over the weekend… 
Anyway, yeah, I’ll incorporate the useful procedural reference info here into our manual, and stash a copy of this for reference.
I’m planning to head back into the shop tonight or tomorrow night to troubleshoot some more.
I’ve been spelunking through ULS’s docs, but I don’t yet have a clear idea what was causing the X axis glitches last week. I have some leads to try (like manually resetting the origin to account for the ~3" offset), but nothing real concrete. @dannym, @EricP: If you have any good troubleshooting advice, please feel free to share. 
Progress continues on our manual. I’m liking how that’s coming together, but I think that’s ultimately of dubious value until we figure out how to make the machine itself reliably do the right thing.
Nothing that comes to mind, we could download inkscape and try to prove if its something weird in illustrator?
Thanks,
Eric
Yes, maybe. I have not tried anything but Illustrator yet. But now I’m seeing other unexpected offsets, this time on the Y (rotation) axis. Either there’s something I’m just not understanding about managing the coordinates on this thing, or some software is going crazy at some level.
The image below shows my much-abused test jar. Ignore the text engraving, as those were my earliest test runs.
The thick engraved lines should both be right on top of the sharpie mark across the tape. Instead, the first attempt was offset around +70 degrees (marked with #1). After that, I paused the job and went back to check absolute position with the X-Y button on the laser panel. It still said zero should be on the black line. So I started the same job again from the laser panel. Now it was offset by less – about +60 degrees (marked with #2).
Then it got even weirder. After referring back to the manuals and googling a bit, I went back to the laser again, and it looks like everything drifted another ~9 degrees? i.e. when I hit the X-Y button and jog to “0 degrees”, the red dot is approx. 9" off the original point. I’m not absolutely sure that something I did in the meantime might explain that last bit, but I certainly did not intentionally offset it like that. I don’t think this effect came from the host PC or Illustrator, though.
I’m going to look into whether a manual reset of the origin coordinates might help. Beyond that, I’m stumped for now.
On the bright side, the scaling on my test patterns is coming out perfectly. So it’s not like the rotary encoder is skipping steps or anything like that. Also, the rastering quality is gorgeous.
Biggest problem is these unpredictable offsets. No luck googling or spelunking through the manuals on that tonight, unfortunately.
I do seem to remember coming across some short document last week that said something like “what to do if you origin ever reports any value but 0.0” – now I can’t find that doc, either. (In an unfortunate coincidence, it looks like Windows Update blew away the browser history when it updated to Chromium Edge.)
One more “new” gremlin, though: I printed two patterns that should have wrapped around the entire 8.327" circumference of this jar. The laser decided to just stop printing after ~7" around. This seems consistent with the initial offset, so I guess maybe this is just a side effect of that where the graphic design actually got shifted and cropped? Not sure.
I didn’t get around to installing an alternative to Illustrator tonight. I can probably take another swing over the weekend, but if someone else wants to try, let me know. I’d be happy to share my draft guide.
This is sounding mechanical, but I’m not sure.
It’s been used before at ATXHS for some extensive projects and didn’t give any probs AFAIK.
I’ll take a look when I get back.
What was the diameter entered into the Print dialogue box versus the project work area Y height?
Could be mechanical, I guess, but I’m suspecting more software/firmware or configuration. At least I think I can say it’s not a fundamentally broken encoder or something like that since the scaling cane out right on. I suppose the encoder could possibly drift in between runs so it gets the wrong starting position?
As for the settings, I was pretty careful to make the art board (page height) match the driver’s calculation exactly because last week it seemed like it would outright reject jobs if that didn’t match.
Specifically here, the diameter of my jar was 2.65” and the calculated page height came out as 8.327”. Odd side note: that’s slightly more than 2.65” * pi, so apparently ULS added some minor rounding or margin… but it doesn’t seem to do that for all diameters? Weird… but I chose to trust the driver and enter that same value into Illustrator. AI “helpfully” rounds off the thousandths digit, but I don’t see how that could account for the large offsets.
Here are related screenshots that I took along the way for my manual doc:
Also, the print preview shows up rotated, but the actual print comes out at the expected rotation. I guess that could be a clue that perhaps X,Y are getting flipped, but only in part of the data? Might be interesting to test if the printed Y offset turns out to be related to X coordinates on screen.
Unfortunately, things have gotten a bit crazy and I haven’t managed to get back into the shop recently. I have, however, updated my draft manual. It is not 100% complete, but if folks have feedback on it, by all means please comment on the Google doc. My intent is that this manual should serve as reference material for a class and eventually be linked from one of those handy QR codes at the shop.
I think we still need to figure out the odd axis offset behaviors before we open up the machine to general use, though. I’m not sure if anyone has had a chance to troubleshoot that more? @EricP, @dannym?
Update on my plans and request for help: It’s now looking very unlikely that I’ll be able to spend more time on-site working with the rotary laser through the end of December. We are planning (very cautiously) to visit family, which means stricter personal quarantine starting in just a few days.
@EricP, @valerie: I’m happy to share a writable copy of my document to anyone else who might be able to contribute. I’ve got it in my personal Google Drive right now, but I presume we have an organizational drive or shared folder we could move the master copy to? I’ve got the document as well as a folder of screenshots and such that may be handy to keep archived in a folder near it.
I also don’t mind continuing to refine the document, which I can do remotely of course.
Thanks @J-LoM! Getting it in the ATXHS Google Drive and continuing work from there would be good. You can put it in this Manuals folder here. I just shared it with you as an editor so it shouldn’t give you any problems, but if it does let me know.
Thanks for all your work on this and totally understand your situation. I’m trying to go to extreme isolation mode to feel OK about having my dad over for Christmas who has been very strictly isolating. Hope everyone stays well and safe!
Thanks @J-LoM you made a ton of great progress on this. @Cfranke if you would like to help with this now is your time. It would be basically involve following the manual and seeing if you can operate the machine with it safely and effectively. Then commenting on anything that isn’t clear or documented
Thanks,
Eric
@EricP, @Cfranke, @dannym: I wonder if anyone has found time to work with the machine more since the posts here in mid-December? @EricP, I remember you emailed about a clipping/scaling issue or something?
Regardless, I’m going to try to get to the shop Sunday evening (2021-01-10) to futz with it a bit and refine the manual.
I’ve also finally moved the draft manual into the shared ATXHS Google Drive Manuals folder. So anyone with edit access can now update the manual there.
Note that there’s still several TODOs for clarifications and rounding-out the graphics workflow. I’ve already taken some prelim screenshots for some of that, so you can also look in the images folder next to the manual document for those.
Here’s the document link:
Well… It was better-behaved tonight, but I still had an odd offset issues. The weird thing, though, is that previously I had experienced random Y-axis shifts, but tonight I saw a random X-axis shift. …but only on 1 of two jobs.
In the photo below, I engraved the clear bottle first. Everything came out exactly where it should. I used the Adobe Illustrator workflow, and it all worked very smoothly. Great!
But when I loaded up my second bottle and used exactly the same workflow, the design came out offset in the +X-axis by about 1". i.e. since the bottle is laid on its side in the machine, the X-axis aligns with the height of the bottle and the offset means the design is about 1" lower than I intended. The scaling of each letter is perfect, so it is definitely an offset issue.
Everything else about this is wonderful. The engraving quality on both jobs is lovely. I just still don’t understand why I’m seeing “random” offsets from job to job.
FWIW, I still haven’t tested non-Illustrator workflows since my test bottle worked so well. It’s still quite possible that this is somehow Illustrator-specific, but I just don’t have compelling evidence one way or another there.
I made some minor tweaks to the manual along the way. Will try to work on it some more over the next couple weeks.
Hey all! Hope everyone is recovering from the deep freeze. I’m a new member and super interested in doing a rotary laser project at some point. Has anybody had any luck recently with the calibration issues for this machine?
Are you certain the head itself didn’t get bonked out of place mechanically? The stepper isn’t high torque, it’s possible to force out of position.
@dannym Pretty sure. On my test bottles, I watched them rotate further than expected before it started etching. Behavior wasn’t perfectly consistent between runs, and unfortunately never figured out if there were any particular “magic” states or workflows correlated to the issues.
When the machine works properly, it produces excellent results. I just haven’t found time to fully troubleshoot it.
@dannym After my last post, I realize you might be asking a different question than I answered… I’m fairly confident that my bottles weren’t slipping, but it is possible that I jogged the rotary head itself before starting the job. Certainly tried not to, but that could be part of the issues.
Thinking back, I also observed some fast powered rotation jogs while navigating some of the on-screen menus (e.g. going in and out of focus or X-Y modes). I wonder if there might have been some slippage or lost encoding steps during those?
