OK…it time for an update on my lasing experience. Long post coming…
As i said earlier, once I saw that Dave had a Chinese laser cutter WITHOUT a MoshiSoft Corporation laser controller board…and saw that he was cutting OK…I bought one from the same eBay ad that Dave used. When it arrived…it had the dreaded MoshiSoft Corporation controller board. From prior experience, I was pretty sure it was going to be buggy, so I started researching installable upgrades…which are out there for around $400.
I installed the software on a Windows XP machine, a Windows Vista machine, and a Windows 7 machine. The MoshiDraw, the CAD software, “worked” on all three computers…more on “worked” later.
I went ahead and moved stuff around in my shop to install the laser. I wanted to set it on a counter that runs along an exterior wall. First problem I ran into…when the fan is put on the back of the cutter, the front of the cutter is 4" out over the front of the counter…and not on it’s feet. So…I thought it was going to require that I fabricate a small counter extension.
As fate would have it though, when I looked at the fan that came with it, I noticed that the hatch on the fan which covered the wiring was askew. So, I removed the hatch and immediately determined that the fan was NOT going in my house. For starters, it was a 220v fan rigged to run on 110v. For seconds, the fan wiring and the power cord wires were twisted together and minimally soldered. Then the wiring was bent over and stuffed into a 1" long insulation tube. The whole thing looked cheesy and unsafe.
So…off to Home Depot where I bought a NuTone 50 CFM bathroom ceiling fan. It’s a 4" thick unit designed to install between rafters. The input side is completely open and is covered by a plastic fan shroud. I chucked the fan shroud and made a mount from 1/4" ABS plastic that fit in the back of the laser cutter. I wired in a proper extension cord…and put this in the back of the laser cutter…and voila, it fit on the counter. Later I bought some metal duct material and a dryer vent and connected the fan out to the outside.
I found that I had three airbrush pumps…one brand new one from Harbor Freight that I musta bought 10 years ago and lost track of…and, surprise, surprise…it came with long helical airtube…which led me to order a 3D printed laser head cover into which I stuff that tubing. Voila, I got air assist up and running…which IMHO, should be call fire snuffing. It literally blows out any flame that is developed from lasing…so, less smoke to deal with.
The water pump was put in a new bucket from Home Depot and the tubing that came with the laser was long enough…so all I had to do was cut holes in the top of the bucket.
Then I plugged all four devices into ONE outlet strip…cutter, fan, pump, and compressor. So, with one flick of a switch, all four devices gain power. That’s kinda important as you want to ensure your water is flowing and your fan is running and your air is blowing…BEFORE you turn the laser on.
When I first hooked everything together, it did NOT work properly. The XY table went nuts each time I powered it up and ran the laser head into the right wall…instead of homing to the upper left…and it kept the X stepper motor running. That’s really hard on stepper motors and Gilmer belts. An email to the seller got me a tip to inspect the Y axis limit switch cable where it connected to the limit switch. After some disassembly , I found a bad solder joint. I fixed that, and the table started working fine. Given my experience with the fan’s power cord and the bad solder joint on the limit switch…I then did a complete cable inspection. Fortunately I found there are actually few solder joints in this cutter.
OK…now to the software. Put simply, MoshiDraw as a CAD program is complete junk…but it seems to control the laser OK when cutting. If you like CorrelDraw, this system came with a program called MoshiLaser, which self installs into your copy of CorrelDraw11 or later…allegedly. I have not tried that because I significantly prefer MS Visio over CorrelDraw…so I went looking for a method using MS Visio to make drawings…and MoshiDraw to run the laser. I’m still playing with this to find the ins and outs.
The first 15 hours playing with the software were spent trying to understand MoshiDraw. I’ll be simple. There’s no documentation worth a hoot. There are no tutorials on YouTube worth a hoot. There’s little to help on the CNCZONE.COM web site. The program has literally 100s of controls…of which you need to understand about 10 to make it control the cutter…but finding those 10 was the challenge. Further, the CAD side of the program is buggy…and lacks features…and has an man machine interface I don’t like…and it has pull down menus with Chinese characters on them. It has check blocks that seemingly do nothing. It has radio buttons that are unlabeled…and lots of menu items that do nothing as far as I can see. Like I said…for CAD, it’s crap.
But…I found that I can pull up MS Visio in another window. Copy the drawing image and paste it into the MoshiDraw cad window…it cuts just fine. I’ve saved Visio files in several “drawing” formats and then used the Import function in MoshiDraw. That works to a degree…but I did run into issues.
I’m still exploring the software…and have only had one issue cutting. On one cut, the program lost track of the stepper motor position…which made the cut offset from where it was supposed to be. That’s likely a bug in the controller board…or, some drive issue in the XY table. It’s happened only once…but I have not done much cutting.
I’m very happy with what I have now…but it’s been a struggle.
