What’s the cheapest way to get to get lightburn to work on a standard k40? Most solutions are £200 to £300 so the same price as the machine…can it be done cheaper?
Also, why can’t lightburn be adapted to work with a standard k40 even at only a basic level like whisperer?
The cheapest option would be to get the miniGerbil controller from awesome.tech for $79USD(or69 pounds). It is a 2 axis drop in replacement controller for the K40. It is a 2 axis controller only though, you can not add a motorized Z bed or dedicated rotary axis to it like the Cohesion3D laserboard. But it is a great little controller at a good price.
I think I would only ever use 2 axis so this seems like the one I would go for when I buy a K40 and only a 1/3rd of the price so much more affordable. Thanks for the info.
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It could be done, but it would require me reverse engineering the protocols (I can’t use the Whisperer source as reference or I’d have to make LightBurn open source). That means you’d be paying for the $80 DSP version (anything that has to be reverse engineered costs more).
It also means replacing the driver, and I’d have to either turn off or ignore anything to do with power settings and multiple layers, since the M2 Nano doesn’t support those things. It’s a lot of time and effort to go through for a relatively poor user experience, so I haven’t bothered. I might at some point, but given that Whisperer exists for free, and there are good controller swap options, it’s been low priority.
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