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The Touchcut controller supports Text Macros (detailed here), allowing text meta-codes to be inserted into the G Codes rather than a multitude of text geometry and tool on/tool off pairs.  This allows faster text marking as full retracts and height sensing are no performed between strokes, and supports dedicated text marking systems

NOTE Excessive labeling of parts can greatly slow down productions, especially if the marking system is not designed with for fast text marking (using a subaxis, eg Pinstamp, or some kind of raster technology, eg REA-Jet).  With basic Vector Text marking, where the whole machine moves as it draws each stroke of each character, make labels as short and concise as possible to reduce the stroke count and minimize machine marking motion and time..

 

Text Marking Time Estimation

Marking Tools have settings to help accurately time text marking:

 

Marking System The type of marking system in use.  Different systems may calculate their text marking and/or geometric marking times differently

The options for this are currently:

•Not Set A default "placeholder" setting.  PrimeCut will try to infer the marking tool type by its name and will auto-set system if it thinks appropriate.  Eg if tool name contains "jet" or similar and marking system is Not Set then it will switch it to REA-Jet and set defaults for marking accel etc.  If no match found will set to Generic Scribe.

•Generic Scribe, Plasma These will all use a stroke based time calculation, and depend on having Process Data to look up the Feedrate and Start Time.

•Engraver  For a spindle based, sprung loaded engraver.  Uses a similar stroke calculation to Plasma etc and thus still needs Process Data

•PinStamp  Uses a high speed subaxis.  A stroke base calculation is used using the high subaxis Text Acceleration for both marking and rapids with the text.  Addiitonal allowances are made for additional starts if the text length exceeds the marking window size (Window Aperture)  Can have different marking modes, continuous or dot.  We suggest creating different tools for the different modes so they can have independent Cost IDs and different Feedrates.

•REA-Jet v1,v2 For earlier REA-Jet inkjet systems, where an angle line of jets is swept across the text. The Marking Feedrate (from Process Data)  is used for the sweep speed, looked up from costing data.  The calculation must account for the angle of the line of jets relative to the text angle, as this increases sweep distance.  Older Reajet Implementations (V1, V2) required the head to attain a constant speed, adding to the total sweep distance significantly.  PrimeCut accommodates the extra rampup, rampdown and textLeadin times automatically for REA-Jet, REA-Jet v2 as follows:

REA-Jet v1,v2 Ramping Allowances:

Time allowance for ramp up to to spedd and ramp down to stationary ( 2*Marking Feed/Text Accel )

Performs a constant Distance calculation ( (Text Width + Extra Travel)/Marking Feed )

•REA-Jet ECat Marker: For later REA-Jet inkjet systems, where an angle line of jets is swept across the text. The Marking Feedrate (from Process Data)  is used for the sweep speed, looked up from costing data. The calculation must account for the angle of the line of jets relative to the text angle, as this increases sweep distance.  The new natively Ethercat driven implementation (REA-Jet ECat Marker) can gear its nozzle timing to the current sweep speed is thus much faster, not need to reach full speed.  This system uses adaptive font sizing: below 14mm a 7 pixel font is used, which increases progressively to 30mm text from where a full 16 pixel font is used.  Text sizes greater than the nozzle array length (67.5mm) can be marked in multiple passes with this system.

•Stamp Wheel This uses a hard-coded approximation based on time to index each character and stamp it.

 

Marking Tool Settings

Stroke based time calculation uses the following settings

Text Stroke Delay  For Vector Marking in particular.  How long it takes to initiate each stroke of a character. This can be relatively long, up to 2 seconds on some plasma systems such as HPR plasma systems.

Text Acceleration For Vector Marking in particular, this is the machine rapid acceleration normally, as the entire machine must accelerate to form a character stroke. On Pinstamps this is typically much higher, around 2000 mm/s2, or 0.2g.

 

 

Window Aperture (Only for PinStamp)  the minimum of the width and height of the pinstamp aperture.

Text Leadin (Only for REA-Jet v1,v2 ) extra distance swept ahead of text to ensure we are a constant speed, setting is from machine.

 

The Marking Feedrate is not a tool setting, but is obtained from the Process Data by looking up the tool's Cost ID against the zero thickness of the current material.

NOTE Process Data lookup for marking tools does not depend on material thickness, so we always lookup marking data against a virtual thickness 0.

 

 

Recommended Timing Settings for come systems (Kinetic Internal Redmine issues #11192, #13672, #13673).  

The 400mm/s2 or 0.041g accelerations are based on a machine rapid acceleration setting of 400mm/s2.