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Problems connecting to the laser cutter

Added by Anonymous over 12 years ago

(continued from another discussion on this forum)

You and your laser cutter both need to be connected to your network. Usually, this is with a router connected to internet, which then hands out unique IP addresses to everything on your network. The protocol for this is DHCP.

The most common way is to have everything on your network ask for an IP address on power-up, which the router then hands out. That's why I enabled DHCP in the sample LAOS configuration file.

Once the laser has an IP address, it'll report that while it powers up. Make a note of it, go to VisiCut -> Edit -> Advanced -> Manage Lasercutters... - then click on LAOS HPC, Edit, and then double-click on the address currently shown (192.168.123.111), which is most likely not the address your laser cutter was set to. Edit to the proper value, save, close, etc.

Note: I do seem to get into glitches regularly, whereby the VisiCut print job takes a long time, and the laser I2C display is stuck in "Receiving...". A reset of the mbed, or a full power-cycle of the laser gets me out of this state, but sometimes it keeps failing like this several times in a row. I suspect a software / timing issue.


Replies (4)

RE: Problems connecting to the laser cutter - Added by leenvw over 12 years ago

Hi Jean Claude,

As i understood, I only can connect the laser to my router. However, I'm not able to connect the laser there. Is there a protocol to directly connect to the ethernet cable in my MAC?

RE: Problems connecting to the laser cutter - Added by Anonymous over 12 years ago

There is - you can invent your own pair of IP addresses (in that case, 192.168.123.111 is a good start for the laser) and manually assign them to both your Mac's ethernet port and the laser's ethernet port. Then a straight cable between them should work.

Or attach a spare WiFi router to the laser, as relay for your access point. That would bring the laser into your WiFi environment (assuming you have one). But this too needs some fiddling to get all the networking pieces working happily together.

Note that what you're running into now is not laser cutter specific, this sort of nastiness comes up with anything needing an ethernet connection.

(Ceterum censeo the laser should use a WiFi Linux board)

RE: Problems connecting to the laser cutter - Added by Martine over 12 years ago

It works!

We connected the laser directly to the computer. This didn't work for me.
In the network it works perfect.

RE: Problems connecting to the laser cutter - Added by KalleP over 12 years ago

When connecting with UTP cable directly between two devices you often need to use a so called cross over cable. These are usually available at the computer shop and will cost more (for no reason) than the regular UTP flylead and often have a red (or other non-standard) colour of rubber boot to remind you.

Connecting via a cheap WiFi or ADSL router/switch is often the easiest after it has been set up and if DHCP is turned on for all devices, the router will assign IP numbers dynamically as required. You can usually check what the router is up to by logging into a console port via Telnet or HTTP with your web browser and checking what the IP address of the connected devises are. You can then Ping the IP number from your PC/laptop to see that the network part is working.

(I assume LaOS firmware has Ping turned on)

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