well a raspberry pi work for a laser engraver

Question

well a raspberry pi 3 work on a laser engraver

fvan · Answer

Yes, I've successfully installed LaserWeb3 on a Raspberry Pi to control a cheap Chinese 2.5W laser engraver from banggood/gearbest.

the-dubster · Answer

In a word - yes! A brief google search turned up these for you. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/home-made-cnc-laser-engraver/ http://makezine.com/projects/engravr-a-pi-powered-laser-engraver/ and https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1026345 The last gives you you a lot of info. Edit: (1) The first two links reference (or point to) here - so only one is required really. (2) Oops, last one is can run on a Raspberry Pi but control is using an Arduino Mega 2560 - which would make this little beaut very useful . . . . Essentially it uses GRBL (known as gerbil for fairly obvious reasons) - GRBL is used for 3D printers / Cutters / CNC Machines. Kinda what you're after . . .

Robert Peter Oakes · Answer

So technically the answer is yes but with caveats, the examples given above are for a wee little CNC / Laser engraver, almost every successful RPI based solution involves using a separate GRBL to Step/Direction controller, this can be abased on a UNO, MEGA, STM or other microcontroller on a a shield/Cape or connected via USB or serial. The PI is very good at providing the user interface (See OCTOPrint or Pronterface for example of 3D printer solutions... still GCODE) but the microcontroller is much better at the FAST step/direction pulse generation and timing required to move the steppers smoothly, there just not so good at translating a circle smoothly into step and direction for example, so the PI in the case of CNC machine is pacing the feed of GCode to the controller and also pre processing the GCode to simplify the arcs, circles and other complex moves into simpler sets the controller can easily deal with, this is the normal and in my opinion better approach.