For my purposes, sending commands without processing any response is perfectly fine. I can imagine a high production environment wanting to take more control of the laser system though.
I'm working with a 15 year old Rofin-Sinar RSM-103D which has a Spectra Physics T20-BL10-106Q laser inside. It's diode pumped and is rated for 3W average power. It's Q-switched with a ~8nS pulse width which results in a peak power around 25KW at a 10KHz pulse rate. Fairly impressive for it's size and marks stainless easily. I've even managed to cut aluminum foil and mark copper (very very slowly). I may try extra-cavity doubling the laser to get 532nm which should be much more effective on copper - half the power, but 100X the absorption.
Anyway, most Spectra Physics lasers use the same or similar RS-232 commands so this should be useful even with more modern machines. I'm pretty sure most current, diode pumped lasers will have some level of control over a serial (or USB) port.
FWIW, I run a one-person company called Starlight Photonics and make my living selling laser stuff on eBay as seller id Junktronix. I'm hoping to contribute to the project by expanding on the RTC configuration section of the documentation which assumes familiarity with the RTC and is still quite confusing to me.
Kevin
On 1/28/2013 10:00 PM, Jim Hart wrote:
Kevin,
thanks for the feedback.
Currently we're thinking about implementation of a generic laser controller plug-in where you can set these commands manually. When no reaction on the lasers response is necessary this would work without problems.
Just for my personal interest: what laser are you using? May be it worth to have a laser type specific plug-in too...
Kind regards
Jim
On 29 January 2013 at 04:56 Kevin Criqui kcriqui@gmail.com wrote:
Jim,
That would be great. Right now I open a terminal emulator and type the commands by hand. There are a few commands needed to get the laser ready after being powered on and then one command before and after each mark. I can imagine it being useful to have the ability to read and act on the response from the laser, but that is not a requirement.
Here are the commands needed at power on to turn on the laser in standby mode
c1:2560 [set diode current to 25.6A] m3 [set system to standby mode] d1 [turn on diode]
before each mark, I send the command
m0 [set system to run mode]
and after each mark
m3 [set system to standby]
Commands that produce a response which could be useful include
?c1 [returns diode current] ?t1 [returns diode actual temperature] ?x31 [returns diode set temperature] ?x61 [returns diode hours] ?p [returns laser power (on some systems)]
I'm not much of a coder, but I am more than happy to test and report my findings.
Kevin
On 1/27/2013 10:24 PM, Jim Hart wrote:
Hi Kevin,
there is an interface available that gives the possibility to link a laser controller to the project which can be used to send commands to a laser. Currently only the interface exists but no related plug-in that could handle commands to be sent. That's simply because nobody requested it until now ;-)
So we would add a generic serial interface plug-in for controlling the laser for you. So what would you need exactly:
- a possibility to choose and configure the serial port
- a possibility to send a freely configurable ASCII (?) command to the laser
at the beginning and end of a marking cycle
- what additional commands could be useful/imaginable here?
Kind regards
Jim
On 28 January 2013 at 10:48 Kevin Criqui kcriqui@gmail.com wrote:
I'm working with a marking machine that has a Spectra Physics T20-BL10-106Q laser and a Scanlab RTC4 controlling a Scanlab scanhead. Everything is working pretty well, though I still have lots to learn. One thing I'd like to do that I haven't figured out yet is to issue a command to the laser over the PC's serial port at the beginning and end of each marking job. Specifically, I want to send the command to put the laser in run mode at the beginning and standby mode at the end. Is there any way to do this? _______________________________________________ openapc mailing list openapc@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/openapc
-- Kind regards
Jim Hart
http://www.lasermarkingsoftware.com http://www.openapc.com
Follow us at Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/openapc _______________________________________________ openapc mailing list openapc@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/openapc
openapc mailing list openapc@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/openapc
-- Kind regards
Jim Hart
http://www.lasermarkingsoftware.com http://www.openapc.com
Follow us at Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/openapc _______________________________________________ openapc mailing list openapc@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/openapc