Full spectrum Hobby laser gen 5 compatibility?

[Carver (Phill Pittman)]

I am in no hurry and thank you in advance for stepping into the support roll while keeping the company running.

I recently acquired ( was given ) a 2011 Full spectrum gen 5 hobby laser. It functions well but I am locked into proprietary control software that is very limited.
It has set on a shelf for most of it’s life and is working very well but I really want to change to Lightburn and add a rotary function if possible.

I have read the related posts and know now I need to get you some photos of exactly what is in my machine at this time. I will do so within a day or so as I am away from my home base.

I am pretty well versed in heavy industrial cnc controls but no previous hands on with small controllers or lasers at all.

I don’t mind upgraded any and all components that you suggest from scratch including what might be best for a possible future power upgrade. It is a CO2/40 watt as from the factory but I would love to upgrade the actual “tube” and optics at some later point also.

Thanks in advance, Phill

[loather]

Check to see if it’s an RF-excited laser. An RF-excited laser will usually be encased in an aluminum jacket with heat sinks and there will be no external power supply. They are often passively cooled and thus don’t have a water loop (but this isn’t always the case).

A “normal” voltage/arc excited tube will be a glass cylinder with a glass water cooling jacket around it. There will be a separate power supply unit with high voltage wiring going to one side of the tube. If you see this, we can probably make your laser work with the board.

However, the LaserBoard is not at this time compatible with RF-excited lasers. There is some additional control logic hardware you need to build out in order to get them to function, and we don’t have it documented anywhere.

Check that, and provide the pictures so I can confirm what type of machine you have.

[Carver (Phill Pittman)]

Thanks. I am pretty sure it is a “typical” laser. There is a glass tube with water cooling and an external power supply.
there is a paper label on the glass tube that says " 40WT-344".

I will try to get the photos as soon as I can, possibly even this evening… it was actually manufactured in Jan, 2013.

I don’t need much more area than this laser will provide but when I add the rotary device, I will hope to increase my wattage all I can. I understand that the power on CO2 lasers is usually correlated to the length of the tube. I will probably heavily modify the physical configuration of the unit but can’t eat up much more real estate horizontally than the original footprint. Can laser tubes be mounted vertically as long as I can handle the optical changes required and maintain cooling flow.?

[Fred (Fred Heim)]

Although in Hotrods, “more power is better”, you will be surprised how much cn b done with a finely tuned 40W tube. Concentrate on alignment and focus. Most of all, enjoy the ride.

[loather]

I don’t see any technical reason why you couldn’t mount the tube vertically (though please understand they emit a ton of the bad UV when energized, so you’ll want to enclose it if possible). Anyways, the hard thing there will be keeping everything squared and aligned.

Like Fred says, focus and alignment with your existing setup will get you really far.