I bought this diode laser PWM/TTL 450nm 3500mW Focusable Blue Violet Laser Module/TTL/ Laser Engraver on ebay and am waiting delivery. I also have built an Acro System 12 x 12. I’ve been searching all over but can’t find the answers I am looking for.
My question is this: What main control board should I get for this? I would like to use Lightburn with it. I have an old 12v power supply from my Tevo Tarantula which may work, but maybe I need to upgrade that too.
Please let me know what you guys think is the best approach to get me going.
Warning: Personal opinion ahead… others here might, quite rightly, disagree
It depends a bit on your budget, you can pick up perfectly capable GRBL/nano 2&3 axis + pwm controllers for 10E on Aliexpress… I use one on my big format laser and it’s doing a great job connected to a Pi or my laptop via usb.
But if you can stretch to it, go for a 32bit controller with wifi.
I use a esp32 based controller in my combi CNC/Laser and I’m very happy with it. This is running FluidNC, and is fully compatible with anything that supports GRBL gcode, eg pretty much all gcode generators these days.
I also have a 32bit controller sitting in a box ready to go into the big laser, it’s a fly-mellow-rrf board, using a STM32 port of the Duet/RRF firmware. Probably not a beginners setup. And not as widely supported in gcode generators as GRBL.
A big reason why I like RRF and FluidNC is that they keep their full configuration in a file on their SD card; the firmware arrives as a binary with no pre-configured settings.
You have a default configuration to begin with and then you can change any ‘firmware’ setting later just by editing the file via the webui.
If you are building a custom machine this will save you a lot of ‘headbanging’ when you need to change the configuration but don’t want to be messing around with compiling the firmware yourself. It makes life easier for upgrades too.