OK, here goes. I bought a low power (500mW) laser engraver from banggood.com. It's cheap but I just wanted to see if laser engraving would actually interest me. I have had nothing but problems getting it to work.
Before I discovered this site someone on benboxlaser.us helped me figure out how to upload firmware and get it started. Unfortunately, it has only worked intermittently and works less often than it does not work. Now, the laser beam (is that the right term?) has stopped coming on!! There are two buttons on the control board. If I push the left button it turns on the power to the board and if I also push the right button the beam always came on; usually dimly but sometimes at full power. A few minutes ago the beam started to ONLY come on dimly and now it doesn't even come on dimly. How can I tell if the laser unit is shot? I pulled the plug from the control board and used a voltmeter which showed about 8 volts when I pushed the right button so I know there is power to the laser.
Any advice from you more experience users would be very much appreciated!!
Thanks for reading this,
.....Gord
500mW is definately on the lowest possible end to be of any use.
Usually cheap diodes and optics are used for those low end machines.
Decent laser diode modules start in the 2W range and usually cost already the same as these cheap things dumped on Fleabuy.
If there is power going to the laser but nothing happening then I assume the laser was overpowered by default which caused it to have a sudden death.
Problem is you will have a hard time getting this to the seller for a refund but I would try anyway.
I have had similar issues with these items which are not helped by the complete lack of any reliable documentation.
The basic units from Eleks Maker and Benbox using the Arduino Nano controller are not intended for greyscale engraving though there
are a number of references on the internet for upgrading to GRBL 0.9 and using PWM software but all these appear to require customisation of the software to work with the Arduino card.
The supplied software - Benbox v3.7.99 - with Arduino Nano code 0.8c is able to do simple burning but the settings need to be correct for the unit to work. The total lack of documentation can make this difficult.
There are two tabs in to configuration script. The settings below the tabs differ in that the Left hand Tab items can be changed whilst a burn is in progress (pause the print, change the setting then resume the print) the items under the Right hand Tab, if changed, will cause the print to be restarted (GCode recompiled). The RH tab items are also mysterious and if not correctly set can cause the unit to be completely unresponsive.
Some of these values refer to the Arduino Ports that drive the specific functions and hence will render the unit inoperative if not set correctly, swapping the XY ports will change the direction of the print head. These are the values that I have found work.
Right Hand Tab
STEP X = 2, STEP Y = 3
DIR X = 5, DIR Y = 6
MIN X = -1, MIN Y = -1 These are limit switches and are not used in this unit.
MAX X = -1, MAX Y = -1
PPM X = 800, PPM Y = 800 This setting adjusts the scale of the output. For a 1:1 scale factor this should equal the stepper motor step size.
LASER 0 = 12, LASER 1 = 12 I think this is the laser on / off control.
SERVO 0 = -1, SERVO 1 = -1 Does not appear to be implemented in this version.
Feed Rate = 1000 sets the stepper motor speed between burn points (the speed when not burning. Rates up to 3000 allowed but to high a speed is likely to result in missed step and hence loss of registration.
Left Hand Tab
Serial Port = Set to port in use on PC. Dont believe the 'Success' message, if the baude rate (115200) is not correct it will not work. Check PC settings in Device Manager.
Low Light = 16 not used on the Arduino Nano implementation.(16 to 255)
Intensity = 255 (MAX) not used on the Arduino Nano implementation.
Speed = 300 laser head speed when burning, the slower the speed the greater the burn.(100 to 1500)
Time = 10 Sets the time the laser is on hence the higher the value the deeper the burn.(1 to 50)
Step = 1 Sets the number motor steps per click on the direction buttons.(1 to 50)
So check your settings before you junk the unit. I have been close to dumping mine only to find that its working fine, just requires tweaking.
Thank you, scruffy!! Wow, that's going to take me some time to sort through. I'm not sure I understood half of what you said. I will go through it and see if I can make sense of it. Right now, the LED on the front of the Arduino (?) board does not flash when I plug in the USB cable so I don't think it's going to work anyway. Also, the laser itself does not come on at all so needless to say that's a problem. Vincent, at banggood, is trying to sort out the problem for me but the great difference in time zones makes communication very slow and difficult. I think this is going to be a long process. Thank you again for your time, scruffy.
.....Gord
