So, I am new here, but not new to this kind of thing. I have built many Voron 3D printers, customer printers, Diode Laser, CNCs, etc.
From what I am seeing, the standard replacement board for a K40 is the Cohesion board.
I have installed many boards from Big Tree Tech, Mellow, MKS and even designed my own board around the RP2040 Pi Pico boards.
So far I can’t seem to find any reason that the K40 has to run the Cohesion board and can’t run some other boards.
Currently I have a custom built diode laser with a Mellow Fly D5 board, an OrangePi Zero 3W running Klipper firmware. I only need 2 axis, but it offers 5, it has multiple PWM pins, and multiple inputs for safety switches or other add ons.
Is anyone running something other than the stock or Cohesion boards?
As far as I know, the reason for the Cohesion recommendations you are seeing in many place was that Ray did a good job on the design for working in an RF-noisy environment near CO2 laser power supplies, but also AFAIK he is no longer selling them.
Also, for years, there have been other boards from the community also focused on running gcode to control lasers, like the Gerbil boards and Bart Dring’s various FluidNC boards, including a minimal one for pens and lasers.
All that in addition to the various clones and new designs, as you have seen.
Lots of options, as you’ve found.
Anyone running one with Klipper Firmware?
I have tried several other options, FluidNC the runner up, but I keep going back to Klipper even though it is not a “CNC” firmware, but a 3D printer firmware. I can do so much more with it and the ease of use is 100 times what the others are.
Last I checked, which was a while back, laser support wasn’t mainstream in Klipper. But it certainly seemed interesting. Has that progressed well in the past couple years?
@dougl has used LinuxCNC successfully.
My K40 went from M2 Nano using K40 Whisperer to an MKS SBase v1.3 running Smoothieware. I also put LinuxCNC/Remora on a MKS DLC32 and got LinuxCNC running quite well on it but found nobody around me in the makerspaces willing to join me in using LinuxCNC on things like laser cutters, 3D printers or even CNCs for that matter so just went back to Smoothieware.
I think I might have even run GRBL on it at one point.
As you mentioned, it’s a 2 axis machine with end stops but you need laser options to get high speed engraving and vector cutting working well. You want the laser to ramp power up and down as acceleration changes throughout the cutting/engraving. A real shame Klipper doesn’t get on with laser support since it’s so much like LinuxCNC/Remora or even LinuxCNC/Mesa or Mach/Mesa where are all realtime low latency and lightweight hardware connected to motion planning software on the external computer platform(personal computer, rPi, etc).
Yes, there is full PWM support. Multiple outputs can be configured for PWM control depending on the board.
I have not tried it with gray scale but for cutting or engraving it seems to work like it should.
I need to look into it some more. I think someone has done a branch for laser. I am still new to lasers and my main use case is etching and cutting. So, I have not dug to deep into other uses.
I have 7 3D printers, 2 CNC and this Laser(Diode) I never do artistic stuff. I can, but do we need more people printing flexie dragons? My focus is on functional things. I am in the beginning stages of a full cockpit flight simulator. So, the laser will be used for making panels, gauges, etc.