Epilog Zing - Support

[doggability]

Following on to:

Does LightBurn support Epilog, Trotec, Universal, Full Spectrum, or GCC Lasers?

Sorry, no. We’re a very small company, and don’t have the financial resources to buy one of these high priced wonders in the hope that we can reverse engineer the control protocols, and they don’t return our calls. If enough of their customers poke them, perhaps that will change. (If you have one of these and are technical enough to help with traffic captures, we’d love to talk to you)

In addition to a Boss, I work with an Epilog Zing.
You talk about “traffic captures”. Can you define this? If so, I could take that to our tech and see what he can do.

[LightBurn (Oz)]

It would be incredibly slow to do remotely - it’s very much a touch & feel kind of thing, unfortunately. I connect to the machine with a traffic capture device or application, send some data from their software, and try to work out what the data being sent “means” to the laser. By making small changes to what’s being sent, and seeing how the capture differs, I make decisions on the fly about what other things to try, and slowly pick it apart.

I’m negotiating with a company that’s interested in having this work done to get LightBurn compatible with their collection of Epilog machines. It looks like they might sponsor the purchase of a machine for me to do this work, which would end up being easier.

[doggability]

Thanks for your response. I hope it works out with the company you speak of.

Can you show some links to traffic capture devices or applications?

[DougL (Doug LaRue)]

Epilog Zing rings a bell once run a number of years ago on my first laser cutting experience. IIRC it was a 30W laser. If so, then there’s an open source project called VisiCut which uses an open source library called libLaserCut( https://github.com/t-oster/LibLaserCut says:supports older Epilog Lasers (Zing/Mini/Helix) ) which has support for a number of laser cutters including Epilog and more recently the default M2 board in the cheap K40 laser cutters.

Might give a leg up with respect to how Epilog command/control works.

[doggability]

Here is VisiCut:
https://visicut.org/

Its most recent build was 12/9/2019, so I guess it is stlil active.

Fix GUI threadsafety errors (#541)

It looks like it is written in Java, which is unfortunate given the recent license change.
Just curious, what is Lightburn written in?

[DougL (Doug LaRue)]

Yes, VisiCut is used extensively at FabLabs and especially at the university it was developed at. I was making a 3D scanner called FabScan and the chassis laser files were in the VisiCut format. I was at the San Diego FabLab which had an Epilog Zing laser cutter. I put VisiCut on my Linux laptop, put the Zing on the local LAN and cut the chassis parts.

Doing a bit of research on the VisiCut project I noticed they had a library of parts people could cut and I compared with how the SD Fab Lab did it. We were expected to make a bunch of selections for the wood/material we were using, set those in a PDF file preferences and “print” to the Epilog print driver. But with VisiCut, the design file also housed one or more material settings so you picked the project, picked the material and sent it to the laser cutter. Seemed quite elegant. The VisiCut file is really just a zip file with the gcode and a couple of XML files describing the settings and material(s).

But the code for libLaserCut is available to look at to see how the Epilog messaging happens.

JAVA is not going anywhere… https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/9mi4cs/java_licensing_policy_change_in_2019_what_does_it/

[doggability]

I didn’t say that Java (not an acronym) is going anywhere. If OpenJDK is being used, then there is no change. If Oracle JDK is being used for production, then a license fee will apply.

[LightBurn (Oz)]

Depending on the license, I may or may not be able to use it as reference. If it’s GPL, non-permissive, I’d be required to open source LightBurn even if I used it for reference, and I’m obviously not going to do that, so I have to be careful.

LightBurn is written in C++ for speed, compiled to a native executable on all the supported platforms.

[DougL (Doug LaRue)]

liblasercut is LGPL and yes, it’s Java and LightBurn isn’t so there wouldn’t be any library accessing…
Not sure how that covers looking at the code to check or implement coverage in LightBurn.
The author of liblasercut is quite approachable so simply asking if he knows of a public document describing the Epilog protocol might be productive.

Epilog has been around for a long time so there could be lots of machines out there which would benefit from LightBurn. Just the workflow optimizations of using VisiCut on the Epilog over the Windows printer driver mechanism made for a more pleasant experience. LightBurn would be sooo much better.