Laser engraver hacking

Bill Of Materials: You could see a complete BoM here (upload the bill).

Amount of time: 3 hours.

Total costs: 100 €.

The laser usually come with a proprietary software that only allow you to engrave images. As the chips are going to be cuttered as a vector we’ll need to install a new laser firmware (into the laser) to be controlled with other software (into the PC connected to the laser).

1. Check if your laser could be directly flashable (flash = installing the new firmware) in this link.If the answer is yes, skip to the “software workflow” step. If the answer is no, just continue reading.

2. When the Arduino UNO and the CNC Shield with the drivers arrive, substitute the old electronics of the laser with the new ones following the tutorial of the previous link. The software that you will need to follow this tutorial will be:

1. The official Arduino IDE that you could find in their own page.

2. The open-source laser firmware (GRBL). You could find the version that we have used (v1.1) in our GitHub repository.

3. TThe program which control the laser and is going to send the designs from the PC (Universal GCode sender). You could find the version that have worked with us in our GitHub repository (same link as the previous step).

CAUTION: We have uploaded a different version of the laser firmware to the one described in the tutorial. The only connection that you have to do differently is connecting the laser to Z+ pin instead of SpnEn.

Disclaimer: The programs that we have used in these step are not developed by our group and are hosted in our Github just to keep the version that have worked for us.