MSRaynsford

The RDC6442G controller from Ruida This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible. The Leetro (Pad03) panel on the left and the Ruida panel on the right The view from inside the laser looking up at the control panel The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounti...

The first step towards upgrading a leetro based machine is to acquire a replacement controller. I opted for the Ruida 6442G  to make it the same as my other machine. I bought my controller through ali express from Cloudray , it's currently $266 USD for delivery to the UK it took 3 weeks to arrive and cost around £250 GBP once customs and duty had been paid on it. I would probably recommend buying it through cloudray ebay instead, it's £260 but it'll arrive within a few days. Cloudray  is my current part supplier, they've been pretty good so far. A delay suited me nicely with the Christmas rush on fractal puzzles and other products. The kit of parts as it arrived was very complete. The controller and the screen were protected with bubble wrap and anti-static bags. Other parts include two USB cables to go from the controller to the edge of the laser, one for USB sticks, one for the laptop connection. An Ethernet extension to go the the edge of the laser and al...

Over the last year there has been a steady rumbling in the laser cutting communities and significant amounts of love being voiced towards a new piece of software on the market. Lightburn  is layout, editing, and control software for your laser cutter. It's software that talks directly to your laser cutter and replaces the slightly dubious and buggy software that the controllers are shipped with. It's in very active development and all the reviews are good, it got to the point where I could no longer ignore it and I felt I should check it out. Initial investigation of the screenshots show a familiar interface, all well polished and functional. Lots of additional buttons compared to the standard Lasercut 5.3 interface I'm used to. It appeared to have better control over the laser cutter itself as well as support for material libraries, camera control and sensible move functions. It imports svg files directly, so no more faffing around converting to dxf first and ...

The laser upgrade went remarkably smoothly and the laser cutter was functional but there were a few minor changes and improvements that needed to be done. Fixing the screen image Image flipped on the controller The first and most noticeable tweak for my new Ruida system was to fix the screen display. Most of my cuts are symmetrical so it was a day or two before I noticed that the image on the screen was mirrored. The laser cutter was cutting the correct way so I knew this had to be a simple setting on the controller. In the menu system is an option called 'Screen Origin' we have to set this to 'Top Right' so that the controller knows it's cutting from the same corner as the laser. Screen origin setting Screen Origin should be set to top right Image corrected on the controller Wiring in the water protection The additional wire patched into the WP line on the PSU The lid switch and the water flow detection were already wired direct...

So far in this series of blog posts I've talked about setting up the ruida controller and wiring it into the laser cutter , now is the point where it needs to be tested to ensure that it actually works as intended. In the previous post I failed to mention that the power connector needs to be rewired but it's a straight forward swap of GND and +24V. Once the controller can actually be turned on we're ready to start testing. Testing Automatic Features Safety is all important while testing the machine, there are moving parts and laser beams during this whole process so care should be taken. The big red emergency stop on the machine is always close to hand, the key switch similar. The safety interlock lid switch for the laser is still wired directly to the high voltage power supply so the laser will not fire with the lid open or the water pump off. The first test is to ensure that both axis move in the correct direction. The controller was set up to initia...

Leetro MPC6515 Control System Since I recently upgrade to a ruida controller I figured I should sell the spare parts that I no longer need, a second security dongle is always handy or a brand new control panel should your buttons be wearing out.  Finally I'm listing a complete Leetro system , sure the ruida controller is better than the leetro system but if you've got a limited budget then you can snag a bargain and any kind of DSP controller would be an improvement for a K40. Lasercut 5.x Security Dongle PAD-03E control panel

Pick a nice font, get some sliced wood from hobbycraft and make a bunch of place names, should be super simple right? This kind of work was always a bit of a pain with the leetro controller but upgrading to the ruida and lightburn  actually made it much simpler than before. On the old controller, all jobs had the top right hand corner as the origin. On a project like this with the different length names and the different sized slices there was always a lot of faffing to ensure that the name is roughly in the centre and even then it was a bit hit and miss. The lightburn software lets you easily select the origin point with a single click and you can change it with every job. In this case I simply moved the origin to the centre of the name and then moved the centre of the wood directly under the laser head. Names easily centralised every time. In fact lightburn makes it so easy to change the origin I now move it around all the time. It's a lot easier to fit in with the s...