Hi folks,
Couple of years ago I bought one of J Tech's laser diodes and am very happy. It is on a 4' x 4' machine with MACH3 and all the information on the set up is at this forum : http://www.cnczone.com/forums/cnc-router-parts/287170-crp800-mach3-j-tech-laser.html. So right now I just do line art work and use feed rate to control the burn level.
Talked with J last Friday and asked if I would be able to use PicLaser with dithering to burn images at one power setting and if my current set up should be able to work. His answer was yes, I could burn at a single power setting but when I asked about the set up the answer was more of " I think that will work ".
So I kinda felt bad about hounding J on the phone for support of another companies product. I bought PicLaser and joined the forum. My laser set up uses M11P1 and M10P1 to turn the laser on and off. Almost no dwell so if you burn an image of a square there is not a hot spot from the dwell in other Mach 3 commands. Sooooo... when entering info in the PicLaser set up and doing some tests and looking at the code, I suspect that though you can set up to burn at a single power level... you still need a DAC board?
I understand that for best quality it would be advised to buy the PWM DAC from J Tech but I would still like to know if it is possible for PicLaser to just send on off commands in the form of M11P1 and M10P1?