About the Fiber Lasers category

User and developer conversation about using the Balor galvo fiber laser control software.

Please feel free to ask questions about installing and using the software here, and make requests for support for new machines or features! Thank you!

3 Likes

Having looked at the code and the methodology this should be a gamechanger for people currently stuck in EzCad. I checked and the command structure is mostly the same regardless of laser version. There’s a couple different interface chips apparently but the code is sent via bulk out the same way according to the program.

I whipped up an extremely basic driver for this in meek40t though without a device myself there’s not really any good way to verify it correctly works. One of the meerk40t mods ordered up a card on spec since he’s planning on getting a fiber laser anyway. The work is certainly solid. I reverse engineered the dll and sent the info to nudge the project along. There is also some work elsewhere done to trampoline the dll and capture the various function calls to ezcad which is often pretty nice work.

3 Likes

Hi there,
i agree, it will be a game-changer!
I already tried the Balor repo and succeeded to drive my galvo with it,
also managed to engrave grayscale in raster mode (modification is in merge-request on gitlab).

I also mentioned the Meerk40t project to @Bryce in our email exchange in december =)

2 Likes

Well, with Lightburn’s announcement that they will be supporting Galvo sometime this year, this might make a much smaller dent. Watched part of the LaserEverything live stream and it seems like the galvo work there does work. I whipped up balor into a driver for 0.8.0 of meerk40t and it seems like that stuff might work fairly out of the box to drive the galvo. Though I might need 0.8.0 to fully work sooner rather than later.

There’s a few semi-required changes that I’m making to meerk40t to not be plotter-laser-dependant. Mostly because they are needed for meek40t anyway for supporting things like Ruida. Like baked-in assumptions about the type of laser that need to be made more dynamic.

Should be possible but this might well be late to the party.

1 Like