Hi from Stockholm, Sweden and Stockholm Makerspace

[Didrik Madheden]

Hi. My experience with laser cutters and other CNC machines mainly comes from my membership in my local makerspace. The makerspace has had a "red and black" Redsail CM1490 laser cutter with a 100 W CO2 tube and a work area of 1400x900 mm. (That's 55"x35" for you yanks.) It has been heavily modified 7 years we've had it. Including replacing the TopWisdom controller with a Ruida one.

But the reason for joining today is that I'm seeking guidance around a quirk that came up during the rebuild of a new acquisition at the makerspace. This machine is an engraving laser from Universal Laser Systems. The cool thing is that this machine has an RF excited laser tube, which should give it better precision than a regular high voltage laser. I've measured the output power of the tube, and it still has nearly half of it's original 30W power.

I've taken it upon me to replace the old electronics in this machine with (like last time) a new Ruida RDC6445G controller, and that's where the quirk comes in. (But that's for another thread.) My adventures so far also included modifying the sense resistors of the TMC2160 stepper motor drivers because the steppers were potentially going to overheat just from the idle current. I had to stack two SMD resistors on top of each other because I couldn't find a good value. As well as figuring out how to correctly set up the limit switch in the Ruida controller. Fun times.

I might post more details about the build process as well if anyone is interested. For now, have a good day (morning/evening/night).

[Gene Uselman]

Welcome Didrik- you should start another thread with your laser problems as this forum is only for moderators to welcome people- and after posting here you should be able to see all the forums and post. We recommend saving the original machines Vendor files but if you have changed the controller you will not be able to. Have fun, Gene

Russ @ SarbarMedia on Youtube has been exploring the differences between RF and CO2 lasers by the way.