Rotary attachment

A roller or chuck rotary turns the object instead of moving the head in Y: glasses, bottles, tubes. Lùmen scales the Y axis to the cylinder’s surface and, when you go back to the flat bed, puts the previous setup back. The order of the steps matters: Lùmen reads the controller’s settings, but it can’t see when you plug in the rotary’s cable.

Setting up the rotary, once

In Machine & material (in Advanced, the Machine section) turn on Rotary attachment: it tells Lùmen your machine has one. Then open Rotary setup…, with the machine connected.

Choose Rollers or Chuck and enter the numbers from the rotary’s manual: the mm per rotation and, for rollers, the Roller diameter. Then the object’s diameter, or its circumference: one updates the other. Lùmen reads the Y axis’s flat-bed calibration from the controller, so it can put it back later.

How Lùmen scales Y: Change the machine's Y setting is for a rotary plugged in where the Y motor was, and Lùmen puts the setting back when you return to the flat bed. Scale the job leaves the machine’s settings alone and stretches Y in what Lùmen sends, for a machine that drives its rotary by itself; on the Atomstack P1 it is the only choice. Mirror the rotary axis is for an engraving that comes out mirrored round the object: a rotary mounted the other way round, or on the other side of the machine. It writes nothing to the machine, so you can switch it with the rotary on.

A rotary job, in order

1. Put the rotary and the object on the bed, with the rotary’s cable unplugged. Rollers parallel to the frame.
2. Line the head up while the gantry can still move in Y. If the machine can home, home it first. Then jog Y until the head is over the exact line to engrave, and X to where the design should sit. The laser pointer shows you the spot. Focus on the top of the cylinder, which sits a radius above the bed. This is the step you can’t come back to: with the rotary plugged in, the gantry no longer moves in Y.
3. Set the zero there. The cross on the canvas is now the object’s crest, the one line where the beam arrives square and in focus.
4. Check the numbers in the setup: the rotary and the object’s diameter.
5. Press Switch to rotary and wait for Lùmen to confirm.
6. Only now, plug the rotary’s cable in. Switching to rotary turns homing off in the machine: plug in first, and a homing cycle would spin the object until the machine raises an alarm.
7. Place the design astride the zero. Center design on zero does it for you: half the engraving on one side of the crest, half on the other. The first time on a new setup, the ↻ button next to it turns the object exactly once with the laser off: mark the object and check that the mark comes back to its place.
8. Show Frame. The object rolls back and forth across the design’s extent: you see exactly where the engraving will land.
9. Start.

What changes in rotary mode

• Lùmen always uses Custom Origin and never homes.
• Jogging Y turns the object: that is how you present a particular side to the head, like a mug’s handle.
• The work area is one turn tall. A design taller than the circumference wraps onto itself.
• A saved project doesn’t remember the zero on a rotary: the object has been taken off, and its angle can’t be recovered. Repeat steps 2 and 3.

Going back to the flat bed

When you are done, press Back to flat bed and wait for Lùmen to confirm it has put the flat-bed values back (with Scale the job there is nothing to put back). Then unplug the rotary and reconnect the Y motor. Turn Rotary attachment off only if you won’t use it again. If Lùmen warns that the values it reads from the machine don’t match, follow its message before a flat-bed job.

With photos, step by step. The guide Rotary laser engraving on Mac: a working process shows the same procedure on a real machine.