laser raster engraving

Thanks for explaining things a bit more. There is no reason why you can't run a separate faster thread with Mesa hardware to trigger the laser. Using the Z axis was a convenience to pulse the laser but surely there are other ways to do that provided you have an output under control of the laser thread, not the Mesa servo thread. I guess the problem then might be that you only get velocity updates every millisecond but would that be a deal breaker? Having sufficient overtravel to allow the axis to get up to speed before it started rasterising would almost eliminate the need to monitor velocity if it was accepted the commanded axis velocity was obeyed accurately during the run.

I had a look at the code in Github. I can't see anything in it that would mean its not compatible with the current version of LCNC except possibly the need to include Joint Axis code if you are running a dual motor gantry somewhere. This would require some simple changes to the ini file.

So I think the question becomes "Is the so called Magic Z the right way to trigger the laser with Mesa Hardware or is there a better way?"

And "What other hardware could be used to trigger the laser on and off if its not tied to Mesa?"

The problem with doing laser rastering with Mesa Ethernet card is the you cannot use a base thread so you are limited to a maximum raster data update rate of the servo thread period

At 500 mm/sec this means that the shortest pixel is 0.5 mm long at a 1 KHz servo thread.
You can run Mesa Ethernet cards at up to 4 KHz with the correct fast CPU but that's rather limiting.

Ideally there would be some clean way to include the raster data in the gcode file or external file and have "data painting"
firmware in the FPGA card.

I can make firmware that buffers raster data and synchronizes it with motion
(either a single axis or a length vector for data painting on curved surfaces) but this also
requires LinuxCNC driver support and possibly changes in the interpreter, though a lot could be done
in hal with gstreamer.

Peter, thanks for your input. How would Linuxcnc send raster data to the FGPA? 0.5mm long dots is about 50 dots per inch (dpi). If you could transfer a 32bit unsigned long per servo period, you would have about 1600 dpi resolution, if you could send 2 unsigned longs per period, you'd have 3200 dpi which is right up there with resolution along with film and laser platesetters and the like used in the printing industry (although they are not often driven past 2400 dpi).

I would not use a fixed data per servo cycle system but rather send a variable amount of data
to keep a motion synced FIFO full. The FIFO data-out clock would effectively be phase locked to the
desired axis position or a hal synthesized length vector for data painting on complex surfaces.
This allows for very high resolutions (Diode lasers can be modulated to the MHz region
and beyond) and greyscale data

PCW how difficult is to implement this?
What changes need linuxcnc driver?
This with support of diode lasers is awesome.

Hello again.
I plan to make a laser machine for raster engraving at speeds up to 3000mm/sec & acceleration up to 2-3G in X axis up to 1000dpi resolution.
This huge speed and acceleration is only achievable only with servos
and very little mass at laser head. The design will be flying optics.
Yes some machines like trotec can go up to these speeds & accelerations.
Will be used linear rails hiwin or thk.
I can use a chinese controller like ruida but this controller have problem
that support raster engraving of 1bit dithered images with fixed power so you can play only with black pixels density to achieve semitones
or support
grayscale engraving and in this mode the output power changes depending on pixel 0-255 8 bit value.In this mode the laser fires on all pixels and the semitones achieved by adjusting the output power of laser depending on pixels 0-255 value.
In this mode by firing on all pixels have huge impact on total engraving time because laser scans all the area.

The best raster engraving system must combine 4 things:
1) dithered image to work with the black pixels density
2) regulate output power of a pixel depending on grayscale value of a pixel 0-255
3) regulate time of laser hits a pixel depending on grayscale value of a pixel 0-255
4) skip pixels with 255 (white) value for reduced engraving time
Combining 1&2&3&4 can get the best results with reduced engraving time.
A ready controller that does these things does not exist..
So i want to do these with linuxcnc & mesa hardware.
In what stage the datapainter firmware is ?
Can i do these with mesa & datapainter firmware ?