Boss 4055, anyone?

At the moment, I’m literally looking to find out if anyone here has had any experience whatsoever with this make and model of engraver. I have a few issues and questions, but want to make sure they are even relevant to ask before I post 3 or 4 pointless posts if no one here knows anything about this machine. Google has not been my friend in this situation, so I’m making this a “last stand” on the topic…for now, anyway.

What are your questions ?

Thats a bit of a strange post. Laser engravers are based on the same mechanics- do you have a specific question? Post a link to the machine you are considering perhaps.

Its unlikely anyone here will give you buying advice, but they will give you experience .

It’s a strange post because the machine is unfortunately even more strange. Long story short, it was acquired via a donation to a NPO. The model number is not one that they have info on their website about and it’s hard to scrape together any semblance of data on that specific model number online in general. Thought I’d throw the question out over here if anyone else had experience with this make and model so they could help us make it more usable. Right now, it’s being used via Lightburn and VERY few people that are using it are happy with having to use lightburn. To be fair, the other lasers being used by this NPO basically work like industrial printers. You make a file in Illustrator or corel draw with the template the same size as the machine bed. Adhere to colors the machine recognizes as well as line thickness for vectoring, then literally send the file to the machine like a print. hit “start” on the machine and it does it’s thing. Lightburn is a whole different ball of wax. And I was hoping to find out that someone either got K40 whisperer to work with it (SUPER long shot) or some easier software… or maybe that they were able to swap in a different controller. Ultimately, I was grasping for straws in an effort to help out this NPO that got this extremely rare model of cutter on their hands and are forced to pull teeth in order to utilize it. I was reaching out to see if anyone had known of/used/experience with it before I threw out a flurry of very specific questions that probably wouldn’t be answerable if no one here had used the machine. That’s all.

The workflow sound like what I remember when my local maker space had an Epilog laser cutter. I don’t know of an open source software package for laser cutters which uses a print driver but back then I switched to using VisiCut( https://visicut.org/ ) on the Epilog and it allows for using color mappings to assign vector cutting, engraving and marking. IIRC you do set the power level somewhere and don’t recall if it too uses vector line widths for the power.

It supports lots of laser types so maybe one of the GCode options would work with your BOSS if it’s a GCode controller.

I noticed on their website you can call them or contact their Tech support. I’m not sure if you’ve tried that yet or not.

Something is odd, Lightburn is considered one of the best software products for lasers.

Neither package you mentioned are specifically for lasers. It might be they just don’t understand the process, how the laser works or what background things the originally used software does.

Most people are more than happy to get something like Lightburn, so I’m curious why they dislike it…

Good luck

:smiley_cat:

@jkwilborn I was a member of a FabLab which had a workflow like what was described, ie you created your drawing using colors to represent your laser operation(K40 Whisperer does this and I think the original Corel Draw too) and the line width set the power. There was a chart mapping line width to power output. Once the drawing was made, you’d save it as a PDF and then open in Acrobat Reader and print it to the Epilog print driver. People learned this and that’s what they liked…

I installed VisiCut which was designed for use at FabLabs and had/has nice features not found in the original software( and only recently found in LightBurn ) but the members liked what they knew and those in charge of the laser cutter deleted VisiCut.

Lots of people don’t like change…

How true… being biological I get it…

Just seems like a lot of gyrations to get something…

When things get more configurable they get more complex…

Thanks for heads up…

:smiley_cat:

it sure was alot of gyrations and what’s worst, there were a few things in the print driver users could change and they persisted so if one person changed the settings, the next person had to know the defaults or else their laser operation wouldn’t be what they expected. There were lots of failed/wrong cuts or engravings. But it was the devil they knew…

I came from using CorelLaser with my K40 to using Lightburn with my 50W. While Lghtburn is a very good program, the biggest issue I had was taking a SVG file I had made using CorelLaser (Corel Draw) into Lightburn.

With CorelLaser it was a “What you see is what you get” laser job. Black areas engraved and white areas didn’t. So if I wanted something to not engrave I could just put a white shape over the black area or just put a white shape over a black shape to get a design without any other editing gymnastics.

Light burn doesn’t like that since it handles the SVG files differently and tries to combine the different vector curves.

While Lightburn is a great control program, it’s not a great graphical design program. For anything other then something very basic, I’m still designing in another program and have to be very careful how the design elements are merged so it imports into Lightburn as a useable design.

I’ve gotten a lot better at designing for Lightburn, but it’s still kind of a pain sometimes.

2 Likes