[Bryce] obtained a fiber laser engraver to use for rapid PCB prototyping last Fall. but he was soon frustrated by the limitations of the standard EzCAD software that typically includes these and similar gadgets — it is proprietary, doesn’t have features aimed at PCB manufacturing, only runs on Windows, and is buggy. As one does, [Bryce] decided to ditch EzCAD and write his own tool, Balor, named after the King of the Fomorians.
The controller board in [Bryce]’s machine is a Beijing JCZ LMCV4-FIBER-M board, consisting of an Altera FPGA and a Cypress 8051 USB controller. So far, he hasn’t needed to dump or customize the FPGA or 8051 code. Instead, he sorted out the commands by just observing the USB operations as produced by a copy of EzCAD running know operations. A lot of these engraving systems use this manage board, but [Bryce] want’s to collect data dumps from individuals with different boards in order to expand the library.
Balor is written in Python and provides a set of command line tools aimed at engineering applications of your engraver, although still supporting regular laser marking as well. You can download the program from the project’s GitLab repository. He’s running it on Linux, but it should work on Mac and Windows (let him know if you have any portability issues). check out our review from last year about using these lasers to make PCBs. Are you using a laser engraver to make rapid prototype boards in your shop? tell us about your configuration in the comments.
