Hello,
I am Aristidis from Greece.
Below I adjust TIG welding to AR2 and I made test how to weld inox tube AISI 304 outside diameter 12.0mm thickness 1.5mm with end cap 9mm.
It is accurate enough for production. The only problem is the backlash error. So I couldn't use circle command. When I try it it made an ellipse not a circle.
Thank you for watching.
That looks awesome. Thank you for sharing that. could you tell me more about the circle command, how did you make the circle weld? I would like to understand the backlash error you reference.
Thanks Chris for quick reply and good job for AR2. I weld with moveJ command like picture below.
With red color is the movement I made.
About backlash error. I face this error when I try to make movements 6mm. If you move J1 from right to left then you can measure with a touch point that it needs 2-3 steps of the stepper motor to change direction of the arm. This translates of an error 0.2mm to 0.5mm when you move from right to left and opposite of J1. That's ok. Every machine has this error. So when I made movements for example 100mm diameter circle, the circle command works perfect because backlash error was 100 time smaller. If you try to make 10mm circle then backlash error starts to be noticeable. If you use J2 and J3 then the error became larger. This is eliminated easily for example at Mach3 with a tab that you can set backlash error to every stepper motor separate.
Here is a 2D example of a circle. If we start at 1st part of the circle and go to the 2nd we J1 will have no problem but J2 at 90 digress will stop for 0.5mm because of the backlash error. The same will be from 2cnd to 3rd for J1 etc. So if you upgrade program V2.0 of AR2 please take into consideration to add a tab with J1 to J7 (because we truck will have the same problem) and add a manual correction of backlash error. Evey one can measure this and correct it manually.
Sorry for the big reply. Please let me know if you have more questions.
Thank you for the information, that is very interesting. I also wonder if the number of waypoints being executed plays into the error. For example the AR2 software default is 100 waypoints per circle but with a circle this small I wonder if trying to calculate 100 positions causes zero steps for certain joints at many points along the circle. I wonder what the circle would look like if you changed line 945 in the source code "numWayPts = 100" from 100 to 16.
Thank Chris. I want to try it but can you send me a way to compile and execute the source file because I try with pip installer and python to exe with no result. Do you have any instructions or a video?
Ive been using auto py to exe https://pypi.org/project/auto-py-to-exe/ but you can just run the source code directly if you install python 3.7, py serial, numpy and inputs.
Aristidis are you planning to try mig/mag as well? i am planning to design a special welding gun for AR3 that has low enough weight. Did you have any problems with the weight loaded to J6?