Hi everyone! I work at a university makerspace and we have a couple laser cutters from the mid-2000s including a large GoldenSign machine that had been running on a Leetro MPC6515 controller. A couple weeks ago, it stopped working between two of our student demos: the first one went by without hickups and when we tried to turn the machine on for the next one we could hear it activating but the control panel would remain off and the laser head would not move/shoot. We checked the power sources and the axis drivers (I apologize if this terminology isn’t correct, english is not my first language) and they all seemed to be okay. We checked the power went into the controller correctly but none of the pilots on the board lit up and no current left it, so we figured it might be dead and in need of replacement. We managed to find the piece on eBay and acquired it from a shop with good reviews but have received an MPC6525 board instead of the 6515.
Upon changing the board (disconnecting the 15 and plugging the electrical into the corresponding parts of the 25), the panel of the machine does light up and run through the usual steps (System Starting, Datum…) but the laser head doesn’t actually move along the homing process. If I stop the homing process I do then get presented with the main screen (File, etc) and I can activate the laser pulse. If I try to download a file from LaserCut 5.3 to the machine it does appear on the laser cutter screen, but if I press start/test nothing will happen (the cutting time will start counting with no laser head movement). No luck using the arrows to move it either.
I’m admittedly no expert on the innerworkings of these machines, but the couple local technicians I do know have told me they will not work with such an old component and I desperately need to get it running for the rest of this academic course (a replacement has been approved for next september, finally). I’ve tried to document everything, and I’m going to attach photos of the old MPC6515, the new MPC6525 controller (with the pilots that do light up on it), the control panel from the cutter and the machine’s electronics.
I’ve gone into the machine options in LaserCut to try to change the controler but only the MPC6515 and 6535 appear. I have tried the steps on a manual I found (half in chinese) where you were supposed to plug a USB stick into the USB port of the controller with a couple files in it to update the firmware and it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. So, I’m a bit stumped and I’m hoping anyone out there might have a better guess at what the issue is and how I can go about solving it. Thank you so so much!
