@jlauer Has the tinyglaser space seen any activity recently? I am about to set up a laser and I will be needing the PWM channel.
No. That workspace just used the z position to turn on and off the spindle pin to toggle a laser. Do you need variable pwm for grayscale?
Yes, I have a 15w blue laser and it needs PWM to keep from overheating and to keep from burning the work. I had started learning about modern coding when I thought it was the only way to get my system back running but you finished so quickly I stopped. I will start learning it again. I also want to set up my spindle speed control and have been putting it off.
This is really the only information I can find so far:
If you just want to toggle the laser on and off to make cuts, then I do that all the time with TinyG and ChiliPeppr, but you do have to create the toolpath from your CAM where it knows to turn the spindle on and off. If you are just looking to run your 15w laser at 50% duty cycle, then just set your TinyG firmware settings to max run at 50% duty. I’ve not heard of a 15w blue laser, but the 12w one I heard of was really a 6w continuous blue diode laser running at pulses with about a 20% duty cycle so it didn’t overheat.
If, however, you want grayscale, I’ve not heard anybody pulling that off with TinyG yet. Maybe others have. You could check out the Cohesion 3D boards if you’re after grayscale.
BTW, if this is the type of laser you’re talking about https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Freeshipping-15W-15000mW-High-power-laser-engraving-Laser-module-Blue-Light-450nm-laser-head/32750454123.html
My understanding is those have the PWM for the pulsing already built-in. That means you simply need to just turn it on and off via the TTL. So, if you’re cutting out parts, you just turn on the spindle pin without even using PWM, and then turn off the spindle pin at the end of the cut. The TTL can run at about 10khz so you can do dimming on it, but I only use that dimming to get a focal point and then if I need less power if I’m cutting thinner stuff.
@jlauer I was able to power up the laser and move it around the machine. I’ll wire up the PWM in a day or two. Picengrave seems to generate spindle codes and cuts pixels. The code it is outputting is trying to greyscale the image with M3 S codes. I can change the Svalues to fit my needs. Right now I am going to try to make it S0 to S255. I had to really push the jerk settings to keep the laser moving. I am at 1B now. I would like to cut balsa but so far generating vector code is not as easy M3 wise. Perhaps I can tweek a Fusion post processor for it.
Well, for what it’s worth, there is a limited SVG widget inside ChiliPeppr that generates vector code with spindle control for toggling lasers. The key to making that SVG widget work is to flatten your SVGs to have no groups. You could use that. There’s also a Font2Gcode widget that will generate laser as well.
Thank you. I will check those out. The laser addition is really just a toy. My main work requires lots of heavy cutting. I am told the laser I found is putting out 8W but that is beyond my power meter. The beam is very elliptical and it marks differently on the x and y axis. It has a lens that helps but if I was serious about using it I would add anamorphic prisms. It has enough power that it needs special optics.