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Thinking about putting my Laser on the home WIFI

Don Baer

Don Baer

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somewhere east of Queen Creek, AZ - South East of
I have been searching around for an easy solution to allow me to use my engraver in the garage. This would clear up floor space in my office and solve my ventilation problem. I asked my tech Guru brother about it and this is what he came up with. So second opinion please will this get it done.
 
So, How does that one actually work? It seems like it's more for 'standard' printers than anything else?
I'm guessing that it would basically 'extend' your usb connection over the LAN so you could run your Lightburn job remotely from inside?
The disadvantage I see with that is that when you are running the job, the only way to work with the laser is from your office.

Another option is to go with a raspberry pi and octoprint. Octoprint has plugins that allows it to work with laser engravers as well as 3d printers and CNC machines.
The way octoprint works is basically the Pi is a computer that you plug your engraver into via usb. It runs a server on it that you can connect to from your computer, your phone a tablet, etc...

So a work flow would be:
  • Design your job in lightburn
  • Export the gcode
  • upload gcode to octoprint
  • Go to the garage, setup things on the engraver
  • Start the job
  • Monitor it from the tablet or office computer.

Another option might be to just get a cheap laptop to put a second copy of lightburn on in the garage and use that to run your jobs.

That being said, What I'm running now is a computer in the shop directly controlling the CNC with the laser on it, as well as my C02 laser. In nicer weather, it's nice to just spend time out in the shop and having a computer out there can be handy.
 
Brent Dowell said:
Another option is to go with a raspberry pi and octoprint. Octoprint has plugins that allows it to work with laser engravers as well as 3d printers and CNC machines.
Click to expand...
I thought about that BUT I am not into doing programming etc and just want something for plug and play. Presently when I run the laser I do it via a LONG (50 usb cable and just let Lightburn run in background while I am on my desktop. I have the camera on the engraver so I can periodically check on the job.
 
Don Baer said:
I thought about that BUT I am not into doing programming etc and just want something for plug and play. Presently when I run the laser I do it via a LONG (50 usb cable and just let Lightburn run in background while I am on my desktop. I have the camera on the engraver so I can periodically check on the job.
Click to expand...

The octoprint stuff is 'mostly' plug and play. It's just a small computer running a version of linux. Some of the configuration stuff can be annoying at times though, so I get that. The other drawback with octoprint is that you wouldn't be able to use the lightburn camera.

So hows it working now? Long usb cable with a little hub and you have the laser and the camera both plugged into a little usb hub? I'd make sure that device supports the camera as well as the laser controller.

You might be looking for something more like a wireless USB over Wifi adapter, or a USB Wifi Bridge. Things can get a little weird when trying to do that though.

I'm starting to wonder if your 50' cable might be the best solution.
 
So I am guessing you hard wired the little usb hub to your router. I see no reason the other device would not work. That is unless you don't use wifi and there are a lot of folks that still prefer cables.
 
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