Fwd: EMC for lasercutting /urgent

[Ray <rehenry-at-up.net>]

EMCers

This morning I received this post and need some help answering questions. 
As you can see, Jacob has made a serious start at his project and answers
to many of his questions should provide good additional material for the
faq and handbook.  

Thanks in advance for your efforts here.  I think that we should start a
lottery for who gets to spend a holiday in the Netherlands! <grin>

Ray

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
Subject: EMC for lasercutting /urgent
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 04:50:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jacob Kranendonk <j_kranendonk-at-yahoo.com>


Ray henry,

I got your E-mail address fom Bert Eding. I’m also
dutch and try to use the EMC for my simple,
steppermotor driven CO2 lasercutting machine. I used
the BDI and now I have both X and Y axis of my CO2
laser machine running. I figured out the basics of the
emc.ini, but because I’m new to the EMC some things
remain unclear.

-I tried to use the M3/M5 command to turn on/off the
laser. I got this working but there remains a +/- 1
second delay even after I put both the spindle on/off
delay to 0 in the EMC.ini file. I also tried to use
the mist cooling bit for this purpose with the same
results. Because a laser responds "lightning" fast
there should’t be a delay at all, or at least very
minor. I made al sorts of  changes to this EMC.ini
file but  this 1 second delay remains. How is this
caused and do you know what can be done about it?  
- I also wonder if it is possible to control the power
of the laser with this same bit? All it take’s is
instead of a straight 5V TTL signal to turn on/off the
laser it should be a 5V TTL signal with pulswith
modulation at 5 KHZ freq. Could somehow this be done
with the EMC since it seems to work nicely real time
anyway?
-I want to "home" as well on just my limit switches,
because these are the only switches I got. I read
somwhere that modifications have been made to achive
this. How can I bring this feature to my EMC/machine?
I also belief that homing can be done automaticly
somehow every time the EMC program is started. How is
this being done?
- finally a GUI should me made/or changed  specificly
to my machine since my machine does not make use of 
all the feature’s as spindle’s, tools, coolant etc.

Because I think the EMC is a very good way for me to
go I really want all of this to work, but I’m afraid I
need personal assistance to configure the EMC to my
machine. So, do you know a person that (if he’s not by
coincidence willing to spend his holliday’s in Europe)
that I could call or so and personally help me trough
this proces. 

Best regards, Jacob Kranendonk