Well I emailed ATOMSTACK and I was informed that the unit can’t have limit switches nor air assist. I was able to add limit switches. And they work great. But, everti e I power off the machine it loses the grbl programming for them even after I have “written” to the controller. So looks like ATOMSTACK handicapped the controller.
I am still looking at air assist but all I am finding is a screw terminal for laser that is voltage matched at volts it seems which could allow an ssr at 3volts and up with a set of dry contacts for an air assist.
Losing settings means you have to set $5, $20 and so on each time again? That’s bad. You could write a macro in LB to set all values on a click, but that doesn’t cure cause. I think I would go for a mainboard change, if they didn’t change all connectors for proprietary ones.
yes, it does, every time I lose power. yeah, I think I want to go to an offline controller with Wi-Fi. I am not sure which one LOL.
The build is pretty good and the laser is great and consistent but their tech support is poor but still better than wainlux LMAO. I was sent 3 different lasers to test and review and in basic form and not trying to do more then a little etching in soft wood the they all performed ok but now when i get into the nitty gritty ugh is the best description LOL
My 10 yr. old home build was better refined lol I was hoping after a 5 yr hiatus it would have gotten better LOL.
If I had this problem, I would not let doing the connectors stop me. You only have to do that once, and then you are compatible with many replacement boards.
That’s a great old board with a lot of freedom to tinker with. It looks like a 8bit Atmega-driven board. You can flash plain grbl firmware where you have control over everything. The only thing you need to find out is the pinout, but I guess they were using the standards mostly back in those days. The board has the required output pins that you can use to drive a relay for the air assist, as well as door sensor and buttons. Of course, you can add limit switches here. Stupid support, as usual. You can even add a z axis, probe sensor and more. Check out the pinout of the MKS DLC (not DLC32), this should give you a good idea of the pin out.
If you are looking for an easy solution to add offline / wireless control, you could take a look at the new Sculpfun TS1, it’s a touch screen laser controller hat can control any grbl laser that uses USB connection.
My first thought also, looks like first MKS board.
Might want to peruse this thread on Reddit, not the premier site, but it’s got information that may help…
Don’t know if you’ve seen this, it’s a couple years ago.
It’s Sculpfun, I don’t know these very well, just remember bookmaking it. They claim a XY DLC V1.0 board… Does a firmware update from Atomstack… might be useful might not… If you’re going to change it out anyway… ?
thanks for the info, flashed it to grbl 1.1 and it looks good so far, it is holding the settings to the eeprom, a3 work with the m8&m9 command since the ssr can’t fit in the case I used a jst plug on the header and a pigtail on the other end to go to the ssr when it gets in. works well so far but time to do the testing.
I have an offline controller for my cnc router that I am wondering if it would work but not sure if it would load the GRBL from it into the machine? I haven’t used it on my router either for the silly fear of it rewriting the GRBL and the seller/maker can’t understand that question and answer it LOL. If it does then I have one. I have 3 lasers that are grbl and the router so It would be nice to have one for all of them as I rarely need to run more then 2 at a time…
I just had to go through and add a vacuum circuit using the m8 command after the manufacturer of it said I couldn’t lol
It has Wi-Fi, but no support for profiles. It’s just a kind of ESP32 addition to any laser. The display features an ESP32 controller running grblESP32 and for the serial connection, it uses the USB port. So you can control the laser wirelessly and also save files to the SD card via browser. I’m currently working on some kind of guide for it, though the user manual already states most of the functions.
Depends In general, the DLC32 is a good choice. It’s quite common, so you will find many guides around it. Though, the display that is available only works with the stock firmware. So you are either tied to the stock firmware (it’s open source now, so you can make changes and compile for yourself, but documentation is nearly zero) or lose the display capability if you change to FluidNC (best firmware out there currently). Maybe grblHAL supports the display, I’m not sure about that.
There are not many open source boards available, so the other option would be to go for a laser manufacturers board. Sculpfun also released their firmwares for some board series, but from series to series the boards lose flexibility (recent versions don’t have a z axis driver option etc.). So, DLC32 is one of the best choices available.
Most people will answer to use TMC2209 or similar. Personally, I don’t think those have any advantages over the standard A4988. For systems where noise plays a role, they make sense (I also added them to my 3D printer which now is nearly silent) but since the laser head is such loud, you don’t need to care about the steppers. You won’t get any noticeable gain in precision either, I think. And they only provide full features if you use the uart mode which requires extra tinkering and is only supported by FluidNC.
If you get them at the same price, take TMC, otherwise take the A4988.
thank you so much, I worked on a lot bigger industrial applications and did industrial controls for 30+ years and same type of things there with preferences and such. I ended up getting the DLC32 with screen, steppers and cables for $20 so worth the try.
Weird how my board just stopped accepting the limit switch inputs even jumping at the plug wouldn’t be recognized at 1 axis.
Well since my atomstack decided to stop accepting limit switch inputs, it was time to pull out my Wainlux JL3.
First thing I had to do was flash the firmware over to the LGRBL (god knows why it didn’t have it to begin with). Their software was quite minimalistic, and their “wireless” printing was God awful it would stop part way through every print and required hot spotting to be enabled on your phone, it was a hassle and why i just set it aside.
The goofy part is the unit will home to the top left with the limit switches and then backoff to the bottom left to wait for you to start printing and I can’t figure out why. It seems like it is an 80 step/mm but the math off of the 20teeth pulley with the assumption of 1.8 and 1/16th but i’m not sure as it was off on movement so I went from 40mm to 80 and it is almost spot on so not sure on what stepper motors it is running.
I forgot what it was like to print with a manual focal adjustment, “is that really the finest point , nope to far wait is that far enough” LOL
It is working in lightburn right now and was working on some glass etching with the atomstack so that’s what i’ll play with for now.
feel free to comment or add any info I might be missing
[quote=“jnl1105, post:12, topic:143185, full:true”]
Anybody have the graphic that is referred to in this missing picture this is from the documentation wiki from the Makerbase-mks Makerbase-mks
About air assist and cold water
Both air and cold water assist use SCL pins as signal control pins.Hardware wiring please refer to: ( M7/M8——>>Pin SCL outputs high level 3.3V; M9M7/M8——>>Pin SCL outputs low level 0V )And select mosfet switch module according to signal pin SCL output voltage
[/] strong text
It looks like a 8bit Atmega-driven board. You can flash plain grbl firmware where you have control over everything. The only thing you need to find out is the pinout, but I guess they were using the standards mostly back in those days. The board has the required output pins that you can use to drive a relay for the air assist, as well as door sensor and buttons. Of course, you can add limit switches here. Stupid support, as usual. You can even add a z axis, probe sensor and more. Check out the pinout of the MKS DLC (not DLC32), this should give you a good idea of the pin out.
( M7/M8——>>Pin SCL outputs high level 3.3V; M9M7/M8——>>Pin SCL outputs low level 0V )And select mosfet switch module according to signal pin SCL output voltage