I’ve not yet traced the wiring enough to work out what those pins are doing exactly, the wire that’s in EX2 turns a relay on that turns the 3 colour status light green (the one that goes orange when the laser is ready to use and red when you have triggered the interlock and need to press the annoying reset button to clear)
And the label on that wire says ‘STA’ so i guess it means status.
i need to do more testing to figure out if that status light wire has power on it all the time the laser is doing a job, if so that could trigger the fan… albeit without the delay i want for it to have time to spool up… but it could switch the fan from low to high speed if i leave the fan running on low all the time the laser is powered up (or automatically start the fan on low after i close the lid perhaps).
But i’m still stuck for the one thing i want lightburn to control the most, the air pump bypass solenoid, so it automatically switches between high or low flow depending on if the layer is a cut or engrave one.
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I’ve been using lasers on and off at hackspaces since about 2011 for very basic projects, but the hackspace i’m a member of now is a 90 mile round trip for me, so i’ve wanted a laser cutter of my own at home for a while
It was finding out i could laser etch off spray paint from copper clad boards as part of making PCB’s that prompted me to finally get my own laser, as that will be much quicker and easier than the UV curable dry film resist method i’ve used before.
i was going to get a bigger laser cutter straight away, but right now i just don’t have the room for anything that’s not a desktop machine, so i decided to get a little K40 to play with until i can find somewhere to put some of the simulator rigs i have in my hobby room to make space for a ‘real’ laser cutter.
Of course me being me, i can’t just use this K40+ as is, i have to try and improve it to fix the annoyances i’ve found with it so far.
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One of my problems is i have adhd and it seems to make me very very forgetful, to the extent i have installed E-stop circuits for the mains sockets in my hobby room and garage, with a switch in the door the lock bar presses against, so if i try to lock up with the power left on it sounds an alarm to remind me to hit the ‘kill all power’ button,
and i need to deliberately turn the power on with a ‘power on’ button to supply power to the machines.
Before i did that i’ve done things like leave a soldering iron on for over a week in there.
So i try to automate as many things as i can to help my absent mindedness, mostly using home assistant and smart plugs, or ESP32 relay boards, arduino’s and the odd STM32, but whilst i am ok at the hardware side of things, the software side mostly goes over my head.