Howdy, new to lasers but not so new to cnc engravers.
recently got a 50W China laser running the stock “CoralLaser” software… Frustrating as it is, it works.
Question is, I want to load Whisperer on my PC controlling my router. (UNO board, GRBL software) to also run my laser. I don’t want to disturb the setup on the laptop running the laser. (if I break it… angry girlfriend!!)
Looking at the Whisperer setup I need the CH341 driver on my PC. If I already have that driver for my router… Whisperer should just work with laser right?
We run a small little arts and crafts business so cant afford to mess up either laser or router!
Ohh… then running the laser from either the laptop (original) OR the PC (new) would as simple as swopping the USB cable? Or does Whisperer installation do weird magic to the M2 NANO settings?
No, K40 Whisperer uses the libusb driver not the standard CH341 driver. So if you have other hardware that uses a CH341 chip connected to the same computer you probably will have a conflict. If the other hardware is a CH340 you will probably be OK. Some Arduino clones use the CH340 or CH341 chips but the real Arduino boards do not.
K40 Whisperer does not change anything on the M2 Nano board di swapping the cable between computers would work fine.
MeerK40t will support the default windows driver and the libusb driver and find the laser on either. You could use it instead or you could ask Scorch to implement the a dual driver setup too. MeerK40t also lets you specify some criteria so you can use multiple devices. The chips have version numbers so if they use slightly different versions you might be able to tell them apart that way. But, generally they lack serial numbers so two K40 devices or a K40 and an Arduino might look the same.
The M2 Nano doesn’t have settings. They have a couple things like the direction of the stepper motors which are set with commands like R and L, but those aren’t settings per se. They are actually just how the chip works. The only other setting set anywhere is the toggle of the CH341 chip into EPP 1.9 mode which just gets undone. There’s no way to save anything to the board.