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Upgrade laser electronics

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.

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?

Upgrade laser electronics

On 07/04/18 19:27, 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.

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?

This may not be helpful but in my experience the Windows plotter driver
was a big POS and a waste of time for accurate work. It converted the
vector GDI to raster and sent that to a vector device and seemed to pay
no attention to the pen parameters configured. When I wrote a PCB
package for Windows I wrote my own plotter driver which did accurate
plots unlike the standard Windows offering. There was a decent
aftermarket plotter driver but whether it's still available I don't
know. Maybe Corel had its own plotter routines, I can't say. I don't
know the packages you references but may look them up for future reference.

Upgrade laser electronics

In article ,
"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.

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?

I think GRBL is the way to go here. There's a flavor for the MEGA that
will work with RAMPS, and a flavor for the UNO that will work with the
basic CNC shield (you don't need the bells and whistles of RAMPS for
this job.)

Your main issue with the steppers (if they are steppers) is that they
should be, or be convertible to, 4-wire drive to work easily with the
cheap/common stepper drivers of the current era (Polulu & clones.)

That means 5 wire is bad (internally connected center taps), 6 wire is
OK (just isolate the two center-taps) and 8-wire is OK (just join and
isolate the centers) as well as 4-wire. You can get 5-wire drivers but
they are not as cheap and cheerful as the 4s these days.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away.

Upgrade laser electronics

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