Laser Engraving with the Duet Family
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Hi Guys,
I'm relevantly new to the Duet 3 boards (a year or 2), and have a friend looking into purchasing a Laser Engraver mostly for etching images on wood.
He's had a bit of a bad experience with trying to purchase an American or Canadian unit, so it crossed my mind that between myself and my friend, we could build one use a duet board.I've had a little look around on the forum regarding laser engraving with the Duet series of boards, but there doesn't seem to be a great deal of people on the forum regarding this.
Would a Duet be a good choice of board for controlling a laser engraver?
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@Dizzwold For entry level engraving it would work. I've done some stuff with a 2W blue diode laser under RRF2.x
The toolchain from picture to engraving was a bit tedious and took a lot of manual editing.
I've heard that lightburn can do that much easier nowadays and RRF3.4 is somewhat compatible with it.
Still takes some tinkering to find the outer border of the frame, but they're working on it.I have a K40 CO2 laser for a while now and it can engrave on wood, slate, glass, tiles, leather and whatnot. (everything but bare metal)
Plus, I can cut some of the materials, which IMHO isn't a good idea with a diode laser.
The K40 comes with it's own set of issues, like mirror-alignment. But it's manageable and falls in the same ballpark as a Duet setup moneywise. -
@Dizzwold See https://docs.duet3d.com/User_manual/Machine_configuration/Configuration_laser
This needs a little updating (on my to-do list!) but is good guide to get started.Raster clustering, which speeds up raster engraving, is supported in RRF 3.5.0-beta3 and later. Lightburn supports this, I don't know if other laser gcode generation software does. RRF also supports G2 and G3 arcs in laser mode, though Lightburn doesn't!.
Ian
