Building a X-Y galvo scan setup for laser marking

[macona]

Item: Laser marking software & marking card

Marking card (Ethernet port) & software ETH, $650

Remark: discount available for quantity order
Price: in US$, not including shipping fee, insurance.
Freight: to be finalised (if the buyer has an account with FedEx/DHL/UPS, he may just tell us his A/C number and do not need to pay for the freight)
Lead time: 2 weeks upon receipt of payment.
Term of payment: prepayment via wire on confirmation of order.
Warranty: 12 months against manufacture's defects in material and workmanship from the date of shipment exclusive of overseas travel expense.
Validity of quotation: 3 months

So, that's it. It is cheaper.

[John007]

You Should just use a rhothor system - www.newsonusallc.com.

It would allow you to integrate the Lightwave 7 W green and has one of the best resolutions out there, comes with Software Dev. Kit that allows you to mark bar codes, dxf etc... all for under 5000




Neal

[Tommm]

This thread is quite old but may be the information is still helpful to somebody: The guys from http://www.halaser.eu/e1701.php offer a scanner controller card that is cheaper than ETH6608 and works with the free BeamConstruct software.

[Junktronix]

This is a DAC board attached to a Beaglebone Black so it ought to be pretty reasonably priced. I've been trying to get prices from them, but have not gotten any response. Are these real? Do you know the price? Who do I order one from?

[swamidog]

I got a response from them quite fast. Price for the baseboard is Euro 250 (one can drive Co2 or YAG lasers with it). For Fiber lasers and/or digital I/O extension boards are required which cost Euro 130 each.

very interesting! i've been toying with the idea of building a scanning galvo engraver.

there was a group using etherdream dac's (made by a PL member). their work looked really promising, but they refused to honor the opensource licensing terms of the DAC so j4cbo pulled the plug on them.

[swamidog]

I would be REALLY carefully with such public statements, especially when they are based on third party information only...

oh? then tell me why did beamconstruct stop releasing their firmware for the etherdream?

[Michael123]

First of all: sorry for making this thread off-topic, may be somebody can split and move it.

A customer pointed us to this threads and some statements herein, we want to comment/correct:

there was a group using etherdream dac's (made by a PL member). their work looked really promising, but they refused to honor the opensource licensing terms of the DAC so j4cbo pulled the plug on them.

The short version: Yes, there has been a firmware version which accidentially contained some GPLed sources. After we have been aware of this, we immediately stopped publishing it and removed the related download. This is an absolutely correct procedure to solve such a license issue. And: we stopped the cooperation with j4cbo, not he "pulled the plug".

The longer version:

Some time ago we stumbled upon Etherdream which looked like a nice piece of hardware which could be interesting of users of our free laser marking software BeamConstruct. We contacted the vendor of it and agreed a cooperation to extend it by everything that is required for (low cost) industrial laser marking. Following we contributed many compatible changes to his firmware to make it usable for our purposes. The amazing thing: we never got any response on that, no feedback, no suggestions, no hints what could be done different, just nothing. Not even our contributions have been added to the public repository. So whenever we updated the sources from his public repository, we had to re-integrate our changes manually (we also provided a free tool with a graphical user interface which listed all Etherdreams within the current network together with their state and gave the possibility to comfortable update the firmware and also got no feedback on this tool, but this is a different story).

Because of this "cooperation" we decided to have our own - this time non-GPLed - firmware and to rewrite it completely. This is not as difficult as it seems to be since wide parts of Etherdream-firmware are non GPLed third party sources (like lwIP TCP/IP stack, Chan's FatFS file system, the hardware-related macros and other things more). Only fetching of streamed data, buffering it and writing it to the hardware had to be re-implemented which was not that complicated. The more complex things always have been done on host side within BeamConstruct's plug-in (micro-vectorisation of the data, adding of laser- and scanner-delays to the microvectors, calculation of scanfield correction, calculation of wobble-modulation, calculation of marking on-the-fly offsets,...).

And then it happened: we released one firmware version that accidentially contained a few of the old, GPL'ed sources. This was caused by a merge-problem of our version control system and never was done by intention. After we have been noticed that there is something wrong with this firmware, we immediately stopped publishing it and removed the download. A few days later it was replaced by a new firmware version which was clean again.

But also after this issue has been solved we got some "feedback" from the vendor of the Etherdream now, which has been that rude and unfriendly, that we decided to stop all cooperation with him, stop our development and to drop support for Etherdream. The reason for that was not the (completely solved) license issue but the fact that we have been blamed that way after we put nameable efforts in this project (about one year development for firmware, additional tools and BeamConstruct plug-in) without getting anything back. Or in other words: we tried to help j4cbo to sell his scanner card in industrial area without getting paid for it, without getting nameable support from him, for laser marking software that itself is available for free, and have been badmouthed for that.

And to answer this question too:

oh? then tell me why did beamconstruct stop releasing their firmware for the etherdream?

The license-issue free firmware and the plug-in for BeamConstruct has been available for more than one year after we stopped further development of it. So this was not stopped, we kept everything available for existing users. Meanwhile it was removed from the newer software packages since it is really outdated and would miss some of the new functions and features of BeamConstruct. But the old software versions that contain support for Etherdream are still available for download.

To say that clear: we definitely respect the idea of open source and its licenses. More than this: we like this idea and therefore publish many things as open source too. We offer an SDK for free that contains many souces and provide a public GIT repository on fedorahosted.org, all open to the public. So why should we steal a relatively simple piece of source like the core-implementation of Etherdream firmware?

Thanks for letting me clarify that here.

Michael

[Junktronix]

I sent another request. I hope they get back to me since I've got 2 nice marking machines here that I'd like to get running.

I got a response from them quite fast. Price for the baseboard is Euro 250 (one can drive Co2 or YAG lasers with it). For Fiber lasers and/or digital I/O extension boards are required which cost Euro 130 each.