I’ve built a pen plotter and succesfully used laserweb so far. Now I fitted it with a laser.
I’m trying to do a simple test to burn a cube at 10%, 20%,… of the laser power. My produced gcode always uses max power (M3 S1000).
Hardware: arduino uno, CNC shield, GRBL.
Laserweb 4.0.998 config: I set laser power from 0% to 100%, disabled “burn white”, set the grayscale to average, set Shades to 10.
“Show Documents” displays the image correctly. Tweaking contrast and gamme gives a correct change in the image. “Show laser” also shows a correct image.
Ehm. It’s wired to 12V and the PWM pin goes to the Z+ limit switch, which is the PWM pin of the arduino.
LaserGRBL can simply control the laser with M3 S1 to S1000. I’m trying to cut a simple square now, and I can’t vary the power either.
“Laser test” doesnt do anything. Pen up/down turns the laser on and off.
Do you use a special servo version of GRBL?
RC servos are not realy PWM controlled, they accept puls durations in the range of 0.5 to 2.5ms. Therefore a special version of GRBL is needed for servo control, and this version is not compatible with Lasers.
PS: The “Laser test” feature in LaserWeb might be broken.
I think I tried a modified servo version before. GRBL recently reflashed with the latest version from the master branch.
I’m using an arduino nano to convert the PWM signal to a stepper servo, when using the pen module. For the laser, it just connects to the PWM signal.