On Sat, 7 Apr 2018 11:27:17 -0700 (PDT), "Dave, I can't do that"
wrote:
Hi Guys,
Just picked up an old laser engraver that was based on a plotter, looks to be about 20" x 12". The laser itself lives (ouch), but the transport electronics are fried. Besides when it was working, it used windows 3.11 and Corel 5 (I think he said)!!
I am wondering if I can use an Arduino+RAMPS and Marlin/GRBL (???) to drive the thing back t life. Anyone have some links to a DIY build? I do NOT want to go to something like Mach3, just way too much overhead for what I need at the moment.
Well, the question is, do you want to engrave or do you want to piddle
for maybe a year or more designing the drivers and writing the
software? I'm a professional electronics design engineer. I have
designed a high power driver and interpreter for a company that never
quite made it off the ground. I'd NEVER do that again. I'd buy one
of the many available 3 or 4 axes controller, wire it up and start
engraving.
I am about to dig into the guts to locate the stepper motors to see what I can
find on voltage current etc. Since it was based on a plotter, (no idea what brand)
I am guessing RAMPS might work. Wiki shows win3.11 and Corel-5 as 1994.
Helpful thoughts?
Back then I was running an E-size engineering plotter with windoze and
Corel-5. Win3.11 still contained an HPGL driver. When winders
dropped hpgl support in XP, Roland (one of the major vinyl
cutter/plotter manufacturers) developed their own drivers. They are
no longer on their website. I have preserved them here
http://www.neon-john.com/Neon/Misc/Roland_RWD-028.zip
Using these drivers, you can run XP.
An even better solution is to convert to Linux. Drivers are still
included in the major distributions. Plus many drawing programs
output HPGL directly. I use InkScape with is an open source package
with the capabilities far beyond Corel 5.
I now make neon signs and tubes as my retirement hobby. I have an 8
pen C size HP pen plotter that I use to print my patterns with. I
have a ratty old laptop that could barely run XP. It flies with
Ubuntu Linux 16.04. I mount it as a volume with NFS. I wrote a
little script that monitors a special directory and plots anything
that lands there.
for any other machine in my house or in my lab, I can do a drawing or
spiff one up, then send the output file over NFS to the laptop. I
amble downstairs later to see how the plot is going. This system
works very will and will not soon be obsoleted.
John
John DeArmond
http://www.neon-john.com
http://www.tnduction.com
Tellico Plains, Occupied TN
See website for email address