i feel like i’m sooooooo close…
Hello K40 people…
i’m starting to think that i’ve missed something here… and so would be super great full if someone can give me a pointer…
ive got a K40… (but you knew that… )
and i think it’s a fantastic bit of kit… but like all good makers /modders . tinkerers the original work flow with the moshi software was a real pain…
now i spend all my day in solidworks… and there is real nice 2.5d plug in called HSM works… which can create gcode and this is what i us for my little cnc milling machine… it works like a charm… (i say that but i could be editing my memory as i don’t use if very often… )
so i decided a little while ago to change the cnc board… and make something that would work with HSM… and also i would like to be able to control it like i do with my 3d printer… (sorry … i just cant stop collecting gadgets) which is via octoprint… (which is a stunning product… )
anyway…
so progress to date…
got a smoothie board, which looks like this…
and a laser power supply that looks like this…
with a test fire button… and a power level pot
now i’ve been through forums / read pages of articles on getting the beam to be controlled by the board… but can i get it too work…
so i want to solve this once and for all…
in my mind i need two things… one the details of what wires go where… and two the config…
and then a method of testing it…
now i have a test method… as i can use the web interface on the smoothie board and issue a M3 to turn the beam on… and M5 to turn it off… so i’m just after the other bits… keep it simple as i’m an idiot… but if i get this too work… i’ll create a guide and make sure its available… as i cant believe that i’m the only person struggling with this…
thanks
Pb…
Hi guys … Ok Friday is funday here in my world… So time to have a play…now I noticed that the firmware I was running was the edge (I had to work out that the GitHub shows a whole list of different options and now I’ve found the master one)
But after doing the firmware.bin thing with the master firmware I now get nothing on the screen… And no blinky lights… What’s the deal with flipping firmware’s … Should be that easy…
Or do I need to redo something more trixy… 
Pb
It seemed to do something and it renamed the firmware file (like it does) and being the fumble fingers I am I clearly tried it a few times, but no joy, which made me wonder if as I went for the very latest edge firmware to the master which is a couple of months old if that’s the issue… 
Aahhhhhhh i have found a 362Kb bin file of rhwe master firmware… (the first one i downloaded was 56Kb… ) and now i’m on the master build… so we are getting there…
what would be super handy is getting hold of some test gcode files… anybody got any?
thanks
Pb
ok ok … what a learning curve this is…
ok i’ve got the laserweb running… and i can export a gcode file… all good…
the next thing is how do i get it to cut it…
am i being daft and missing something…
got ya… i did look… but clearly not hard enough …
the performance via Ethernet seems a bit slow… i suspect that a direct usb is the prefered connection method… ???
So I’ve been playing with the setup a bit more… And a couple of things struck me, laser web runs nicely on a raspberry pi so that’s nice… I’ve not managed to get the rastering working, I think I’m still missing a wire connection…
I’ve been playing with laser web and I can’t find out if I can control a dxf layer, it would be nice to take output from 123d and go directly into laserweb, at the moment I need to go through deleting layers in draft sight… Is there a better way… The wiki talks about using three svg files… But it would be nice to just control the layers… Also how did I manage to break homing, it used to work, now it’s stopped… Odd…
Pb
