Manual Control

[laser team]

Hello Gentlemen,
hope this mail finds you all fine .. 

I went to an exhibition some weeks ago in which many laser cutter and cnc manufacturers were showing their products ..

I think that we're missing some manual controls for Lasersaur .. some switches for jogging .. and one for generating a short pulse of laser .. these controls exist in almost all commercial laser cutters, and they are going to be so useful specially when adjusting the mirrors .. I also found that many commercial laser cutters have small LCDs telling the current state of the machine, beside the manual control of course .. others had a switch that automatically adjusts the focus with motorized z-axis ..
I thought that its going to be great if Lasersaur has these features .. I even thought to do it myself, but when I checked the mega328 I found that almost all its pins are already used .. so I thought that I can use another dedicated controller for this purpose in parallel with the Arduino UNO kit .. but I then thought that I can suggest that you change the mga328 and use Arduino MEGA for example instead of Arduino UNO or any other bigger controller .. this will enable Lasersaur to have all these features .. 
I will be glad to participate in this if you decided to do so and needed volunteers :) ..

Regards ..

Ragy Samy ..  
   

[Steve Baker]

We talked about this a while back.

There are strong reasons NOT to add more controls to the physical front
panel. They cost money, they add complexity, etc. Better to have the
controls on a software panel on a laptop or something.

HOWEVER, the convenience of having the controls with you when you're
setting up the optics is huge.

My idea (which I plan to follow through with when I have time) is to use a
wireless USB "gamepad" controller with the computer as a remote control
for the lasersaur.

Those things are cheap (<$40), reliable (because teenage boys pound on
them for hundreds of hours) and easy to install (one USB plug).

They have two analog joysticks and a digital directional pad - plus
numerous analog and digital buttons.

You could have one joystick for moving the head quickly, and the other for
micro-fine movements. You could use the various buttons to fire short or
long pulses, to replay test patterns...whatever.

The only fly in the ointment is that joystick/gamepad support in browsers
is a VERY new thing.

* Internet Explorer doesn't support them - period. (But it's a lost-cause
for any kind of cutting edge web development anyway!)

* Chrome has a full implementation as standard these days.

* Firefox has an experimental build which works great - but needs to be
rolled into their next release. The guy who is supposed to do that is
heavily loaded with other work right now...so it may be a while before it
appears.

However, we can easily make it so that IE and Firefox work OK - but
without the gamepad controller - so you have to use Chrome for setting up
the optics, etc.

I think this is overwhelmingly the best idea.

-- Steve

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-- Steve

[Stefan Hechenberger]

The software stack of the lasersaur is very flexible. For people who
want controls on or near the machine there are a lot of options.

For example you could have a cheap tablet computer on the machine and
run the web interface there. You can even have the manual control tab
open while you load files with your laptop. You can also write you own
web-based interface that runs on an old android that you build into the
lasersaur.

We will also specify an API so any device with any software can connect
to the DriveBoard and add controls of any shape or form.

I think there should be some time of experimentation before we add
something specific to the reference design.


--
Stefan Hechenberger
studio: Nortd Labs - labs.nortd.com
resident: F.A.T. Lab - fffff.at
project: Lasersaur - labs.nortd.com/lasersaur

[Ward Elder]

I like the gamepad idea. Sounds flexible and inexpensive.
Thank you
Ward Elder
Eldersoft
(204) 791-7754

-- Steve