Rotary Cutting

[amos]

We definitely need a rotary attachment or something to place in the GF that will allow us to do things like this.

https://www.epiloglaser.com/resources/sample-club/drumstick-engraving.htm

[JeremyNielsen]

that would be sweet. For pens and such. Maybe make a manual one with the GF?

[jkopel]

The rotary attachment needs to synch with the laser cutter somehow since it takes the place of one of the axes of movement.
I imagine that if you wanted to make one and hack it in you could probably temporarily disconnect one of the steppers and swap in the stepper from the rotary. You would need to do quite a bit of testing though and it would no doubt void your warranty!

[bwente]

I was thinking there might be a way to use the laser send a pulse signal to an optical sensor. Of course it would have to be added to the software.

Hardware Addon - Idea

I have an idea for a simple rotary attachment/addon. You wouldn’t be able to engrave a rolling pin or baseball bat, but maybe a pen or set of drumsticks. It would be fairly simple to build, you could even use your new glowforge to cut the gears! Basically it is a micro stepper motor attached to a pair of rollers. An arduino attached to the motor and an IR sensor. It doesn’t need any physical connection to the glowforge. My idea is that you use the laser “defocused” to send a pulse to the IR sen…

[Jack]

I’m sure it’s on there mind but it’s a low priority due to the limitations of the Z drop. I think if your semi precise by hand you would do OK, don’t know without testing it but dan thinks we can use the camera to mesh up the position of the previous engrave after you manually turn it. Don’t know how well the engrave will look if you say engrave 120~ degrees 3 times(as the engrave will transition from one cut angle to another abruptly)

[jkopel]

Given that the warranty on the basic unit is only 6 months, I would anticipate that by the time last pre-order unit has shipped someone will already be hacking their Glowforge. A rotary unit is very interesting to me since I have some product ideas to explore, and I am looking forward to poking around at the control signals already present once I get mine!

[Duality]

Good idea. I wonder if the board is expandable to accommodate rotating stepper.

[KyleQuinn]

I’m sure at some point, if GF doesn’t do it, there will be a Kickstarter out there for it.

[laird]

It’s a pretty common router upgrade to connect the Y axis stepper controller to rotation, allowing you to carve spindles and things like that. That ought to work mechanically in the GF, though only for things less than 1.5" across. Of course, the software would need to support it, which is a whole other discussion.