I’ve been racking my brain trying to get a versatile multipurpose firmware on my mpcnc that will do everything I want it to. I am using ramps 1.4 and currently the best solution I have used is v1 mpcnc marlin distro. My issue, however, is that to get full raster support with the laser I need to be able to issue proper laser control commands rather than the fan (m106 on/m107 off) work around. I know marlinkimbra has full laser support on ramps and even uses the same pins (digital pin 44) but uses the proper laser gcode commands. I can’t get Kimbra to compile without a million errors, so I haven’t been able to test it. What I would love is just the Mpcnc specific marlin with the full laser support. I feel like a ton of peeps have been trying to figure out the same issue so there is a demand for it, but my meager coding skills are pathetically failing to result in anything usable. It seems like someone who actually knows what they are doing should be able to merge mpcnc marlin and marlinKimbra and would then become my hero. Any takers? Any better solutions? Thanks all!
I have personally only used the two laser programs from the tutorials, one for raster and one for vector. When the new firmware is more stable I will rewrite them for the newly implemented laser specific commands but they are no different just easier to assign pins.
I’ve been super into laserweb lately and so far it is the best laser cam software I have found (at least for free) and doing laser cut and laser fill paths are super easy even with the current fan hack. With laserweb, though, if we could use the laser m commands then I could make complex projects that included cuts fills and rasters all in a single gcode file. I tried grbl but the ramps port isn’t great.
Ryan, I just re-read your reply. I didn’t realize that the newer version of marlin had implemented the laser specific commands, I thought it was something special marlinkimbra was doing. I don’t know a ton about coding, but when you say rewrite the firmware, you mean making an MPcnc specific edit of marlin? Do you think it would be unreasonable difficult for me to try a stock version of marlin on the Mpcnc and just change the attributes i need? I guess I just don’t know how much your blessedly convenient version differs from vanilla marlin-
Yeah, there are a few ways to do it. I even have a marlin 2.0 version already done for you on the github page linked on the firmware page. You will need to flash it with the Arduino “nightly” IDE.