Middle School Teacher Needs Help

Fortunately, that sounds like it’s covered?

It should have front and back doo switches :slight_smile:

Thank you guys for your insights,

All the doors have locks except the Lid for the laser bay. The school distract want to expose students in the middle school with these tools, so they may explore opportunities in the high school. Gee, I wish we had this in high school.

I am giving a list of modifications to see if the school would fund the project.

Regards,

Marshall

The rear bay with the laser needs an interlock. There is 20,000 lethal volts back there.

I meant to say the laser tube bay has a double lock on it. The work area has a switch on it. Sorry for the confusion.

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Possible confusion here: “lock” and “interlock” are different (and possibly complementary) things.

A lock (as in, with a key) might be a good idea for a unit in a classroom.

An interlock is a switch which disables the laser if the door is open. Lasers are specifically supposed to be sold with interlocks that disable the laser if the door is open. Many cheap ones don’t have that feature.

A lock doesn’t substitute for the function of an interlock. (Of course neither a lock nor a interlock is foolproof.)

Please forgive me if you know this already, but better to be redundant and clear. :relaxed:

This is awesome! I am getting some really good information and recommendations.

After doing some more research I found this control board replacement:

Anyone have any success for this? Would I be able to install the recommended safety features with it? It’s cheaper than a Raspberry-Pi.

Cloudray has a K40 upgrade kit that comes with most items that are recommended. I think I will still have to use LightBurn or RDWorks to operate the machine. Any feedback with this option?

Again I am really happy with the positive responses and suggestions.

Warmest Regards,

Marshall

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The board you found on Amazon is not a Ruida-style DSP controller like the high school one; it’s a board that interprets gcode, and it runs the Smoothieware firmware, though I doubt that they partnered with @Arthur_Wolf or the Smoothie project to develop it.

The @CloudrayLaser set does contain a Ruida. Yes, you would currently expect to have to run it with LightBurn or RDWorks. Others here have actual expertise in that though.

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Cloudray’s upgrade kit is a bit odd.

The controller is great. The Ruida RDC6432G is one of those “budget” 3-axes 1-tube controllers I mentioned earlier.

The range of the 50mA ammeter would be too large in most cases. A 30mA one would be more appropriate and easier to read.

The 6.5A 24V PSU is good and a bit oversized, but you should definitely check what the label of your current 24V PSU says. It might be good enough. If it is, you might as well use it until it bites the dust.

The included head is a lot worse than the one you currently have and you won’t be able to use it anyways.

I’m not really sure why they went with these particular stepper drivers. The DM542S drivers are a tad too beefy for a K40. The DM422S drivers which they also sell are a better fit. I went with DM320T drivers which have the same 0.3-2.2A peak range. Either way, don’t get cheap mystery TB6600 drivers from Ebay. Those often cause problems.

Well, given that your machine is a bit larger, I sort-of expect that your motors have a slightly higher A/phase rating than the motors you can find in a typical K40. If there’s a label on them, google the part number and see if you can find the spec sheets.

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I would not be surprised if these things were not provided as a kit as a result of what Russ Sadler did to the Cloudray K40 he got AND his work on upgrading a stock K50 over the years. The K40 Extreeem upgrade was one of the first which put a Ruida into a K40. I mean the K40 is ~$400 and this controller kit almost doubles the price…

If you want to learn a bunch about how CO2 lasers work then spend some hours watching and learning from the Russ Sadler videos. Here’s one on the K40 kit he designed - K40 Xtreeem mechanical upgrade kit - YouTube

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I just put one of those K40 OMTech drivers into a K40 like yours (with the ribbon cable). You will have to rewire that ribbon cable entirely or build a daughter board (which you probably don’t want to do).

I second the idea of running MeerK40t on a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer to import the designs, leaving the M2 Nano board in place. The Pi will be slow, but not prohibitively so. That’s how I rolled for the last year, and it worked pretty well. You export designs from Illustrator or Inkscape as SVG files and import them into the Pi. I used Dropbox for the transfers, but there are other options.

Just my 2 cents from the “keep it simple” side.

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