LAOS Laser

Should not be too difficult!

You can connect two dials and a ON/OFF button to the "LCD Panel" arduino (as interrupt pins),
and have it send the position via I2C to the mainboard. I need to review the jogging code in the
MBED, as it currently does not respect the physical limits of the axis. ant it should switch the
laser on and off, during jogging, based on the state of the switch.

Great!
We have a Universal Laser Systems Lasercutter PLS6.150D.
Does that work with the HPC LS-3020 complete set?
In the wiki it says it works with HPC and other "cheap chinese lasers".
Ours was not that cheap (40k+), so probably other category?

http://www.ulsinc.com/products/pls6150d/

Thanks so much for helping, I really want to make this work!
Stefanie

Universal laser systems are indeed not "cheap chinese".

They use proper RF lasers and servo drives.
The latter makes the conversion a bit more problematic
(all cheap Chinese ones use stepper motors: easy to interface).

Maybe you can make some pictures of the inside and post them.

If nothing else is wrong with the system, I would not mess around too much
with it. Installing a laos board is not so straightforward.

One route would be to try to reverse engineer the SW and see if it is possible to interface somewhere in (semi) realtime.
For example: draw on the screen (with two knobs) in realtime and send the job to the laser when done (less impressive).

Otherwise: See if you can get a (2nd hand) Cheap chinese laser somewhere and make the etch-a-sketch with that laser.

Just out of curiosity: what would you like to do with it? Is it for some kind of art project?

With regards,

Peter.

Hi Peter,
thanks!
From your comments it seems the best solution is to get a cheap chinese cutter and not mess around with our super expensive one.

I am a PhD student in fabrication.
Here are two of my recent projects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g3LaF9oVFY&feature=g-hist
https://vimeo.com/50379179
password for the second is "potsdam"

I'm currently looking into interactive real-time fabrication to make an analogy to how traditional tools are used (e.g. saw, woodchisels are real-time and produce physical output after every step).

Thanks a lot for your help, I will check what is the best option now!
Stefanie

Nice project!

I had some discussion here in the past on novel ways to control a laser, but not as sophisticated as you!
What we came up with was: using pieces of string and physical objects to make laser cuts,
and using a Wii remote (actually this was implemented by some people).
For the manual control of the laser you can do two things: just using the two knobs for X and Y, or using one
knob for direction, and the other one for speed (a kind of turtle or RC car control).

The laser folding/origami you showed is great, really innovative!

I recall there is a guy in Potsdam that has acquired a Laos board. He may be able to give you some pointers for implementation!