Ctrl-Cut

WTF?

The Metalab has a nice and shiny Lazzzor from Epilog. Unfortunately, Epilog forces us to use their Microsoft Windows-only laser cutter drivers. In addition, they only support Corel Draw as an application from which you can run jobs (other tools might work but are not supported). BRM Lasers (model: brm 90130) and they provide a driver that seems to be quite awesome _but_ it is closed source and it is very complicated (way more like a cnc mill than the laser cutter we had). So for three reasons pwnschlager and me are going to port ctrl-cut to the new laser:

• Ctrl-Cut uses a simple, well known workflow a lot of people already know. That limits their ability to fully control the machine in all its detail, but it also shields them from the complexity. So if you just want to do a quick laser job like you used to do Ctrl-Cut is choice.
• We want the freedom to be able to fix bugs we encounter ourselves and workaround bugs in the original software and in the laser cutter itself. Also we want to be able to add new cool features.
• RDCAM (the vendor driver) only supports dxf as vector format. we want pdf and svg.

Want to help?

Talk to amir or pwnschlager

Progress

Mar 25

Zwax and I physically setup the laser cutter and tried to send a laser job to it for the first time. To do so we discovered there is menu for network settings in the control panel. Anyway, though the laser cutter was reachable on the network we weren't able to send a job via ethernet to it.

Mar 26

I spent the day trying to figure out how to send jobs via network to no avail. I can see that the driver sends a single 6-bytes udp-packet to the LC but never gets an answer. The packet seems to be some kind of "EHLO" because it is also used in the auto-discovery feature of the driver. When you active the discovery the software sends that exact packet to every single address in the subnet. Different cables directly connected to my laptop (in conjunction with tools like ethtool) ensured that it wasn't a fault on the physical connection.

Mar 28

After again spending a bit of time trying to send a job via the network i gave up and decided to see if it works via usb. And indeed, it does. In the meanwhile meks joined me and we kept working together on creating a reproducable setup to create/modify/send/sniff/replay laser cutter jobs. The usb presents itself as a usb serial device which is pretty convenient because we can easily sniff serial traffic. After we verified it worked we started using a wine configuration i created based on lutris to run the driver in linux - works like a charm. Anyway, we hesitated to do actual laser jobs because we found out that you are supposed to wear protective glasses while operating the machine and also because we weren't done reading the manuals. which we really should do before we play with such a complex machine. Tomorrow I will call the brm support line to find out if we actually need the glasses and to ask why networking doesn't work. The same night i took the time to wrap up what we know by now: Datei:Line black.zip

Apr 02

I haven't found the motivation yet to actually call the support, but there is progress anyway. we now have a nice setup to intercept and analyse serial communication between the driver and the laser cutter. But for now we stopped working on reverse engineering and decided to actually fire the machine up. that turned out to be much harder than we expected and i want to share a few of the caveats we encountered:

It won't accept any jobs and the red light is on

After the laser cutter boots it is always in emergency stop mode. you need to press the "reset" button so that the laser cutter accepts jobs again. of course you also have to do that when you actually used the emergency stop.

The "emergency-reset" button

Y-Axis won't move

If you can't seem to get the y-axis to move the laser probably is in rotary mode. in that mode it is possible to work with cylindrical objects by turning the object under the fixed y-axis. you can disable rotary mode by flipping the "Axis U/Axis Y" switch.

the rotary mode switch

Light tones won't be engraved at all

You need to enable the "Output direct" flag in the work settings of the driver

Work Settings

We also discovered that the circuit breaker in the antechamber can't handle the laser cutter and companion devices and had to get power from the WEL.