LAOS Laser

Great work! Can't wait to try it out.
I'm especially curious how the merging of PWM and Laser On will work.

This sounds really good! Can't wait to see it in action! Are you posting a fork on GitHub?

Great! Nice to see other people working (and improving) on the code. Let us know when we can try and pull in the source.

the TFTP is indeed an area for improvement.
Originally the system had a TCP/IP socket, that worked sort of OK (using netcat), and Visicut still supports this interface, however, closing the socket was not always detected correctly, causing the last data to get lost sometimes. Also: the plain socket had no associciated job/file name.

I will make an issue for that. Suggestions are welcome!

Sorry for not answering sooner, I am quite busy at the moment. Will write more later.

Yes, the current state is available on github here:
https://github.com/lukas2511/LaosLaser

Note:
The current version works, but some stuff is messy, some is buggy, and some stuff might break compatibility with other laser cutters and is not yet configurable through config.txt

I am currently engraving stuff with it, works nicely. Have some minor problems, but all in all its great.

Any updates on this?

I looked into the changes a while ago, but they are too wide-spread and unorganized to be accepted as one patch into the main tree. It is just one big blob of changes, with no apparent order.

We can only patch the existing code with it, if the changes are well-documented and each commit fixes one problem at a time.

Also, these patches make changes in libraries that we imported from other sources, which makes things very confusing. It doesn't make sense to change printf commands in someone elses library...

Sorry for not getting back to you guys on this.
Yes, as jaap says, the changes are all over the place and barely documented. Essentially, we fixed what we needed for us. We will try to make the most important ones available as patches at some point, but essentially we decided to just rewrite parts of LAOS from scratch instead of hacking the existing code for our purposes.

I am currently busy with another project which will be done soon. Then my attention is back on LAOS. :)

Hi Topy,

Which parts did you "rewrite from scratch"? I looked all over your changes and 90% of what I saw was changing "\n" into "\n\r", which might look great on your terminal, but not on others. I'm curious to see which rewrite I missed!

You misunderstood:
We have not rewritten it yet, but rather we decided to rewrite parts instead of cleaning up the previous, messy changes.

And seriously, we did do a lot more than changing some trivial line feeds... I don't understand why you are criticizing our work like this. We made changes for our own purposes, and they work. We do hope to eventually commit some of them back to the main tree, but the main purpose was to make it work for us. That's why its a fork. You can play around with our changes, you can use some of them for your own purposes, or you can just ignore it or wait for us to continue work on it. We are planning to do a lot more work on it, but had some other projects to take care of first.

Things that we did implement: Proper manual moves, working "Origin" function, rest position, remember if the laser is homed, cancel button works, ...
Yes, many messy hacks, that's what happens when you pull all-nighters fueled on too much caffeine. So don't use it.

Stuff we want to rewrite eventually includes the whole user interface/menu system, the networking, parts of the engraving function, and some more...
I am also currently designing a new PCB, compatible to LAOS, but more suited for our purposes, as we actually ended up not using much of the board at all... Its currently a huge mess of wires, pieces of protoboard and glue logic.

By calling your post "large improvements" you created some kind of expectation.

I would like to import improvements (even if they are small) back into the mainstream code, but with what you have online right now, I just can't.

Just in time for the LAOS user meeting, Lukas made some of the changes more "merge-able". Check https://github.com/LaosLaser/Firmware/pull/8
Specifically, the cancel button and the properly working manual moves.
More stuff later.