Dual laser software?

I thought with two lasers, you could print continuously and still allow a duty cycle of 50% for each laser.

Question is, how to write the gcode for this?
-Olaf

The result would be 100% power - why would you want to do that ? To increase laser lifetime?

I looked into multiple lasers some time ago - see this - as can be seen I abandoned it, as it sounded very difficult to get lasers focusing on the same spot.

Now that my laser is actually running I have made my own experience which confirms this, it is simply not feasible ( atleast without cnc parts).

If you wanna do this, and just use two lasers, then a prism seems the best solution.


As for your actual question - gcode - why not ignore the gcode and put this feature in your laser driver? Should be fairly easy to make a circuit that devides the load between two lasers (?)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/2015 09:35AM by LarsK.

Indeed, that should entirely be controlled by the firmware, not the gcode generator.

You were thinking of guiding two beams on one spot, but I was thinking of defining X/Y offsets ( like it's done for dual extruders )
Then the "slicer" would have to adapt the gcode coordinates with each tool change.

Yes, the goal is to give the LDs time to cool down and raise reliability.
-Olaf

Hey,

If you have insufficient cooling so that you can't run your diode in steady state ( constant temperature) then you must anticipate the laser beam/spot to change with the temperature.

I see a very visible and distinct change in my burn spot with just a 20 deg C span. My guess is that if you want to raster with high precision you need to get within ~5 deg variation.

This is something you can easily test before spending too much time on this - I could be wrong and it is something to my setup)

Again , answering your question last - I think you can look into dual extruders gcode - But you are maybe getting to the point where you need to write your own post processing script to handle this.