I recently purchased an older CheckMate laser cutter that has a TL-303 controller in it. Light burn appears to be able to read but not fully control this unit and it doesn’t appear to like the output file format Lightburn sends (though I could be wrong as I’m brand new here). I expect any questions about troubleshooting will be “that is an ancient board you should upgrade” but wanted to ask as the tl-30x/tl-303/tl-302/tl-301 searches on the forum don’t turn up any posts. Does anybody run with this controller any luck/troubleshooting tips?
I can see the controllers internal/factory settings in the config in light burn. I can read the coordinates (obviously calculated/counted not based upon some sort of input). I can use the navigation buttons (sort of, they are very jumpy and inconsistent when they do work). But when I try to do seek to a specific numeric position the nothing happens on the laser, re-reading the coordinates I get the updated position. I have not gone through every function, eventually light burn stops responding like a serial or USB time out and I wind up having to kill it to get it to recover. Im using a older Dell e7240 laptop with an I7 that’s been recently imaged with win 10 and a reliable workhorse over all so I don’t suspect any issues there.
We have not played with this exact motion control setup. We’d need one here to get the real-time controls to work, and don’t think they’re made anymore, so not likely enough return on the time taken to add it / cost to buy one.
We have an update for the TopWisdom code that we are testing which might help a little, but if the job file commands are different, not sure how we’d be able to deal with that.
They are still selling them new on Aliexpress, though this doesn’t say much
If you are interested in playing with getting it online the short term I could likely get a serial to tcp port bridge setup and share private access. Alternatively if I get it working with corel or one of the other drivers bundled Im happy to run a few test files and do some a serial port capture incase you do feel like trying to support it. Ultimately I’ll likely throw a newer controller in it when I can get to the service panels again (unless you really surprize me and do want to support it). Post swap, Im happy to throw it in the mail if you do want to play with supporting it for other users. That said that I mostly posted this so that there was a searchable entry on the forum for others that may come across these. That said I doubt the ROI is here to invest any dev time.
