I’ve made a full writeup of the laser engraver project including the current firmware and schematics. It will be updated as things are tweaked and improved, but hopefully this helps give everyone a sense of what we’ve been up to.

Check out the article here.

About two weeks ago Hacklab acquired a Universal Laser Systems ULS-25P laser engraver. Ted found it for sale used for a small sum. But it had broken, ancient electronics which was the reason the unit was sold. We decided that it might be fun to try building our own electronics to get the unit going again. Exactly one week ago Dan and I came into the lab in the evening and tested the laser. We made a little Arduino program to send the laser the correct control signal. Amazingly, it worked! We burned a hole quite successfully through a piece of paper. With a 25W CO2 laser it would be possible to etch and cut a lot of materials under computer control!

A bunch of us worked all last weekend and a few nights this week building electronics, learning to configure and use the emc2 CNC software, and install a place for the unit to sit and proper ventilation to extract smoke and fumes from the etched material. And I am happy to report that exactly one week after initially testing the laser we have a fully working system! Below is a video of the very first run with the laser on.

We still have more to do learning about g-code and the CNC software, calibrating laser power and so on. Also, the machine needs to be moved to its final home in the bathroom with proper ventilation. I’ll be writing a complete page about all the technical details, including schematics, firmware, photos, etc. soon. For now enjoy the video, and please check it out next time you’re at the lab or ask on IRC.

We now have a webcam pointed at the sign….
Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Andrew has written a detailed blog post about making the LED sign work.

Check it out.

Andrew Kilpatrick: Moving Sign 2

LED Sign from hypatia on Vimeo.

moar LED sign awesomeness from hypatia on Vimeo.

Download the video

We’ve started a Hacklab project to bring utility to some surplus LED sign panels that have been hanging around the HackLab! These panels use a high-speed digital serial interface, which has been reverse-engineered by Dan and Andrew. It’s a very complicated and strange system. If you’re interested in digital logic, ask us to explain how it works.

In order to make the panels easy to use for members, we’re going to permanantly mount them on the wall over the stairs.  They’re going to be attached to a nice painted piece of plywood (steev!) and wired up to a server.  We’re going to do some circuitry to allow the sign’s power to be automatically controlled.

We’re going to interface the LED panels with a host computer using an Arduino.  Our previous efforts pushed the limits of the Arduino’s performance, but we were running completely unoptmized code.  Hopefully with a few tweaks, and by getting a bit more low level, we can move the serial data fast enough for an adquite scan rate.

The Arduino’s USB Serial interface will be used to interface the sign with the host computer, which will most likely be running BMix with a custom output plugin.  BMix is software developed by Andrew, Dan and Jonathan for the Blinkenlights project in Toronto, and is very good at controlling a matrix of lights.  It will allow the display to be operated using a standard UDP protocol which already has lots of language support, and will also allow it to be easily shared between a number of users and applications at the lab.  There’s even a video game API.

This is the start of the project and the basic design… More information, photographs, and geeky details will be coming as we dig deeper.