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Metalworking (rec.crafts.metalworking) Discuss various aspects of working with metal, such as machining, welding, metal joining, screwing, casting, hardening/tempering, blacksmithing/forging, spinning and hammer work, sheet metal work. |
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#1
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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? |
#2
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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. |
#3
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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. 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? Arduino and GRBL will work. All sorts of online info. Eric |
#4
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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. |
#5
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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 |
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