Im planning on buying a cheap china laser of 50 watts and a work area of 300x500mm, could be posible to control it with the x-controller, and use it with LaserWeb?
A Smoothieboard based solution is better for this as the firmware supports acceleration better than the GRBL firmware does. Well maybe that’s changed (and may change again), Here’s the page which discusses firmware compability.
I think the X-Controller is massive quality overkill for one of those lasers.
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Note: Ever changing. See the Issues tab above for details.
Firmware Supported Raster Performance CNC Support Pull Requests Accepted
Grbl (>1.1d) Yes Great Great Yes - improvements
Smoothieware Yes * Okayish Okayish Yes - improvements to performance
•If you have a Smoothieware based controller, but performance on Raster is choking you with stuttering moves: This is a known issue.
And why is it that you say Smoothieboard is better?
My version of grbl 1.0c is faster than the official 1.1f for raster work.
It seems that the Arduino/gShield would be a reasonable controller for the laser.
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50W laser? Is it with CO2?
yes
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I agree.
The laser probably has Nema 17’s?. And most likely a single motor on the Y axis?
In that case you would not need the higher current capacity of the X-Controller.
Any Stepper Motor shield should work well.
This time last year the LaserWeb folk were saying Smoothie was the way to go, didn’t realize that had flipflopped.
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Smoothie is better suited for vector cutting and uses an S-shaped accel curve instead of trapezoidal, reducing jerk. That said, Smoothie maxes out at about 1000 gcodes per second in ideal conditions because their calcs are expensive. 100mm/sec at 250dpi produces about 1000 gcodes per second, so that’s where it caps out.
GRBL on an LPC chip (Same as Smoothie) runs at least 2x that, probably more like 4x, because the processing overhead is lower. Motion profile isn’t as fluid, but it’s damn fast.
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My version of grbl 1.0c on the Arduino can do 199.9 IPM in laser mode if your belts can handle it.
would it work if i buy the little k40 and connect the xcontroller and do this mod?
https://openbuilds.com/builds/uk40ob.3988/
So you’re buying the machine and then only keeping the tube, power supply, and case? Am I the only one who remembers the story “stone soup” from when I was young? At some point you’ve got to stop pretending you’re modifying an existing thing and admit that you’re just building it from scratch.
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its cheaper to buy a k40 and use some of its components, than buy each thing from diferent providers
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Way cheaper to mod the k40 to make it useable than to build your own. New lens, air assist head, honeycomb table, and boom! Bobs your uncle! I cut some pretty heavy material with mine. It does 400mm/s etching and 20mm/s cutting. You could with enough motivation add all of that to an XC but then you need ventilation.
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