Inexpensive "Beijing JCZ" fiber lasers - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Bryce
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 09, 2021, 05:34:41 pm
content: I've successfully reverse engineered the protocol of the Chinese commodity fiber laser engraver, the type that costs about $2-4k for the 20W model, typically blue and silver in color, hopefully you know the ones. This laser normally comes with the putrid "ezcad2" software (which, besides its more severe functional flaws, only runs on Windows.)If you aren't familiar with this type of machine, it combines a q-switched 1064 nm fiber laser with a galvo scanner assembly and allows marking/engraving on most inorganic substrates (metal, ceramics); of particular note on this forum, it can ablate copper from PCB stock, selectively remove a whole-board coating of solder mask, and purportedly cut FR-4 (though I haven't tried that one myself.)I am planning to create an open source command-line based toolchain for using this laser. What features would be useful to you? Is anyone interested in helping me out on this project? Besides programmers able to directly help with the coding (in Python), I'm looking for pre-alpha testers who have these or similar machines and enough technical know-how to do USB packet captures so that I can examine the protocols of their lasers and compare them to my own. (A willingness to expose one's machine to the danger inherent in this project is also necessary as obviously this is early-stage, experimental software.) My machine also does not have a rotary axis installed, so getting data from a machine with one would be of interest as I'd like to support that feature.

author: Bryce
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 09, 2021, 07:40:38 pm
content: For reference, this is stuff I'm already thinking about (organized by the name of the proposed command-line tool, all starting with "Balor" after the Irish mythological figure with one eye destroying all it beheld.)Code:balor - send machine-specific binary data (MSBD) to the engravermark (use the engraving laser)light (use the visible preview laser)balor-test - generate test patternsgrid - for machine/lens calibration/compensationmatrix - for dialing in two parameters at a timebalor-cc - generate lens compensation and machine calibration filesbalor-sim - render an image interpreting MSBDoutputs pngbalor-light - convert marking image output of the vector and raster programs to lightingbalor-raster - convert images to a raster MSBD file, using acalibration/compensation filelaser settings on command linesupport image files that Pillow supportsbalor-vector - convert images to a vector MSBD file, using acalibration/compensation filesupport gcode (output of flatcam or cura)support gerber and various pcb / drill formatssupport svgper-entity laser settings with separate tool file orincluded metadata if the format supportsbalor-debug - convert MSBD into explanatory text

author: Bryce
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2021, 03:06:25 am
content: I more or less did the thing I was planning to do above:https://www.bryce.pw/engraver.htmlIf you choose to take the risk to use this experimental software with your machine, I would appreciate hearing about it. Thanks!

author: KE5FX
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2021, 04:29:03 am
content: Very cool. Looking forward to seeing how the PCB process turns out! 2 mil features are nothing to sneeze at.