Laser Cutter Usage Timer

Laser
#1

We finally have a usage timer on the Full Spectrum laser:

988ce31182ac420d.png721×760

This timer counts cumulative time on the laser tube, and cumulative user time between presses of the blue button. Units are Hours:Minutes:Seconds.

Backlight color indicates state:

Violet - booting up

Blue - user time is zero, laser beam is off

Red - Laser is firing

Yellow
— user time is > zero
— laser beam is off
— please pay and hit the blue button to clear user time

Note that this counts time the laser is actually firing, not elapsed time as we’ve been trained to read from the PC print driver. Hence, if you raster or use duty cycle cuts (ie. less than 100% power settings), you’ll notice that this timer reports less time than the print driver. That’s as intended, because tube life scales with beam time, not elapsed time. So go ahead and pay according to this usage timer.

Many thanks to contributors including @larrydag, @dave, Gustavo, @lukeiamyourfather, @william_petefish, @apipe

9 Likes
New specs for laser computers (upgraded and resolved)
#2

I like it. sometimes hard to keep track of just how much time you are really using the laser…

2 Likes
#3

exactly - now all we need to do is wire up something to turn the durned fan on anytime a cut is in progress and for maybe 20…30 seconds afterwards…

1 Like
#4

Awesome, Is the source online? Would be interested in seeing how it was put together.

#5

Not yet - but soon. Happy to share. Will reply to this thread when available. Just trying to compile something more usable than my chicken scratch…

#6

A fan would be pretty easy to do. I’m not familiar with the laser at all but should be fairly strait forward. Simplest would be a delay on break relay for the post time.

#7

For sure. I just wanted to get a simple first step out there, and didn’t want to mess around with isolation, line power or mounting concerns. Send a PM if you’re interested to take on all/any of those parts. I’d be glad to update the timer firmware to provide a fan enable signal. We’d just need to discuss the interfaces, and work a proposal thru the committee.

#8

Sorry for the delay, but I finally managed to pull documentation together and upload to GitHub. You can find the entire design here https://github.com/cottjr/DMS-Laser-Cutter-Usage-Timer/wiki.

FWIW - Note that I took the usage timer offline this summer after it apparently failed, and finally did a little troubleshooting tonight. Looks like the display contrast potentiometer has an intermittent failure. Hopefully I can get that fixed in the near future and work with the Laser Committee to get it back online in coming (?) weeks (?)…

7 Likes
#9

Thanks for sharing. I checked out your repo because it sounded like an interesting project. Indeed it was. Well done!

I read your concerns regarding the EEPROM life. I just sent a pull request that I hope will help greatly extend its life by writing your data to multiple rotating addresses instead of just the one. Perhaps this will allow you to write more regularly and still extend the life of the chip.

Feel free to PM me if I can answer any questions about the changes.

2 Likes
#10

You bet - thanks a ton for the feedback and upgrades :slight_smile: I’m looking forward to review the changes and hopefully accept the pull request. But it’ll take some days before I can get to it…

Laser Cutter Usage Timer wanted