This thing is getting close to being finished. Last night I tackled controlling the laser from mach3. First I tried using the step pulse output to control the laser. I couldnt get a stable enough pulse train out of the computer for the laser to be happy. Next I tried a 555 timer and some optos. Didnt get very good wave shape out of it to make the laser happy. Finally I just used a 555 timer driven by the output signal of the breakout board to drive the laser trigger input directly. That seems to work. Took a little tweaking of the duty cycle and frequency but it looks like it will work for now. I plan on using a uC to handle the frequency generation so mach can control the power but that can wait.
I made the first cuts with it tonight. I used some 1/16" stainless as the sacrificial material. I used the roadrunner file included with Mach3 as the sample. I did a search and replace that replaced all the z-.1 with M3s and z.2 with M5s to turn the laser on and off. The scaling of the road runner files was set to .1, so the whole thing was about 7/8" wide. It ran all pretty slow due to all the tiny segments in the code.
Next I need to put the sides on an a bunch of other little things.
IMG_2603 by macona, on Flickr
IMG_2608 by macona, on Flickr
IMG_2609 by macona, on Flickr