Cheap Chinese Laser - mounted

I added a cheap Chinese laser, 5W. I tried something a little different - a chunk of picatinny rail on the side of the router mount. So far, working well, could use a little paint :slight_smile: but otherwise good. Easy to remove. Having trouble with some interference from something causing the board to reset when I use high power on the laser, but I suspect it’s a wiring routing issue of some sort.

I’m using a SuperGerbil board, which has separate outputs for flood and mist cooling. I’ve hooked up “flood” to a SSR that controls the power supply for the laser. This lets me enable the laser via gcode separately from the router (which is enabled from pwm), so I don’t need to change anything significant with respect to my router control via pwm->an IOT switch (which I may just replace with another SSR) - I can just plug in the laser, turn off the router, and have separate power control for the laser without a switch.

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Is the muffin fan part of the laser or did you add that. Have you had a chance to use it and get any results.

Depends on which part you’re talking abut. The fan at the bottom I added (as well as the aluminum bracked it’s mounted to, and the picatinny adapter) . The fan at the top below the power supply board was part of the laser as delivered. This type has the power supply and a fan integrated at the top, you supply 12V, PWM, and GND and everything is in the complete module, unlike some others that have an external box.

Clever use of a picatinny rail.

I will note that to set this up I built a little voltage divider - the laser requires a 0-5v TTL signal, but my supergerbil board puts out either 5v, or 10v. I need the 10v to drive a router switch, so ended up building a little divider with a couple resistors. Works great - 0-5v for the laser, 10v for the switch. May change to a different switch that also takes 5v, but haven’t yet.