This is almost exactly how I remove it… I simply power down and manually press the Z-carriage downward in order to angle it past the switch plate. Alternatively, one can in fact use a wooden block as you describe. Personally, that’s an annoyance to me that I plan to mitigate by making this my first Al project.
I can also see the potential of having the ability to perhaps transition from router to laser without the impractical annoyance of jogging or power down in a specific multi-platform project.
It’s not their kit but it’s a removable laser I use. Ebay special very simple metal bracket to hold it and I use the PWM pin from spindle to change intensity. I just sandwich the aluminum plate between the snap ring on the router and the router mount. I hold a simple aluminum plate against the work piece standing up and lower the Z until it just touches the laser plate to the measuring plate and it’s in focus at that point.
To get shades of grey though you have to play with it a lot. There are issues with PWM because GRBL attempts to pause to let a spindle spin up before cutting so it’s actually easier to either make it go faster and slower, or you have to install new firmware that allows you to ignore the spindle synch.
Yep I got everything working great. First laser only lasted a couple days. They replaced it for free and are great to work with. Second laser has been running strong. I just leave it mounted all the time and it seems fine. Just blow some air on lens before doing any burning projects. If you have any questions just ask.
I have the 3.8W 445nm JTech Photonics laser and like it. It has worked well with simple vector shapes and Universal Gcode Sender. Although I want to laser engrave photos, so I purchased their recomended PicSender and PicEngrave software, but am having trouble with reflashing their 0.9 grbl firmware.
I’m using their recommended X-Loader and holding the PROG button on the board, but it just hangs so I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
Since you have a PROG button on your PCB, that indicates to me you have a v2.3 or v2.4 CM controller. While I never tried reflashing my v2.3 CM controller, I had fits getting a v2,2 controller reflashed for alternative CNC controls. I came to the conclusion that the bootloader was corrupt and/or inoperable. Luckily I had an AVR JTAG-ICE unit so I could reflash the bootloader. I documented this process here:
This may be your fault and thought I’d give you something to consider for remediating your issue.
Sorry that I missed your request for info in September; a group of us had this discussion last year over on the Shapeoko Forums and had the pinouts identified over there. This is great information to have; thanks for posting it in these forums.
I searched on the Shapeoko forums, Wiki, and even posted in the Electronics section… I was unsuccessful and just dug deeper. I understand how folks looking for info often can’t establish the correct search term. It’s often needle in a haystack or contextual terminology that gets in the way. I hope my efforts benefit someone down the road that’s in the same boat.
It’s fast to put on and take off. I just put it resting on the front of the router mount and use 2 tiny clamps to hold in place.
With GRBL 1.1 it works in laser mode.
I’m noticing your PWM is attached to the Arduino ISP vs. the PWM pins. I presume it because there’s already a populated header there vs. the PWM socket is shipped unpopulated?
Yes it was easier to plug the wires into the header pins.
The bracket was simple enough to make, just cut an arc the size of the router diameter on one side and a small hole for the laser lens on the other side. It is simple to put on or remove this way because it just rests on the mount and then I put a clamp on each side. I have a small aluminum plate that I adjust the Z height with so it’s always in focus after I attach it and put it over the work piece. Since it sticks out in the front, you can reference the front lip with the work piece.
@rogwabbit thanks for this. I’m trying to setup my jtech laser on a v2.3 board which lacks the dedicated head space and this was one of the few resources I found that confirmed the arduino_isp headers could serve as a point to connect for pwm-out as well.